The History of AI

While the concept isn’t new, the term AI and the idea of machine learning go back less than 75 years. We’ll cover:

• The early years
• Advances in AI
• Today’s generative AI
• AI in pop culture
• The future of AI

Keep reading to learn more about the history of AI and where it might be headed in the future.

The early years. The term artificial intelligence was first used by computer scientist John McCarthy at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence in 1956, which was basically a weeks-long brainstorming session. Computer scientists came together to talk about programming computers to play chess better than the people who were programming them—by using machine learning. The group came away from the conference with a lot of ideas, but no concrete products or code for AI. The technology didn’t make its debut until 1985 (more on that later).

By 1966, a German American computer scientist from MIT named Joseph Weizenbaum created the first AI chatterbot (later called a chatbot) to be used as a mock psychotherapist. Weizenbaum named his chatbot ELIZA after the character Eliza Doolittle in the play Pygmalion and its musical adaptation, My Fair Lady. ELIZA was capable of limited conversations with users and was the first of its kind.

Just two years later, in 1968, Soviet mathematician Alexey Ivakhnenkko published an article called “Group Method of Data Handling” that proposed a new approach to AI programming that we now know as deep learning. He developed a new method of data handling and algorithmic layering that led to in-depth statistical learning that allowed machines to learn how to identify objects and trends.

Advances in AI. The initial idea of creating a computer that could beat its creator at chess runs deep in the history of AI. Why chess? Because it requires the ability to adapt to the pieces on the board, project what your opponent might do, then react to one of any number of possible moves. Deep Blue was the first chess-playing AI system that actually won a chess match against the reigning world champion. It took developers more than 40 years to reach this point with AI, as Deep Blue was finally released in 1997.

Since this time, we saw Kismet, a robot programmed to recognize human emotion through facial expressions unveiled in the 1990s. In 2011, a natural language AI bot named Watson beat two reigning Jeopardy! champions on TV. In the same year, we saw the advent of virtual assistants embedded into smartphone technology. AI has gained momentum and continued developing since.

Today’s generative AI. Virtual assistants have become a part of our everyday lives with voice commands that make it easy for anyone in your home. Generative AI has also found its place in society with chatbots and AI art with image creation, music, blog posts, and much more. Even if you aren’t a fan of using your phone’s virtual assistant to search for information or send talk-to-text messages, you still interact with AI every time you scroll through social media. The social media algorithm is a reactive AI that uses every interaction as a way to curate content specifically for you. We’re also seeing limited memory AI used in self-driving cars to recognize everything from stop signs to lane lines to your driving habits.

AI in pop culture. AI has been developed into deep learning machines that can hold conversations, process massive amounts of information in a few minutes, and generate content. Meanwhile, pop culture has been fascinated with the concept of AI for decades. Movies like iRobot, The Terminator, Star Wars, and the aptly named Artificial Intelligence, have explored the potential effects of both benign and malicious AI in our world and beyond.

The future of AI. While we’ve entered an age of AI that feels like it’s already far into the future, there’s much more to come. Theory of mind and self-awareness AI are the next steps in AI advancement. Theory of mind remains in the theoretical stage and can be used to analyze and predict human behavior. In the same vein, self-awareness AI hasn’t been invented yet but is what we see most in movies. Self-awareness AI is where we get things like Star Wars droids and The Terminator’s T-1000. As of the writing of this article, these AI concepts are nothing more than theory and science fiction.

By understanding the young history of AI, you can see how it has evolved over the years and where we could be headed with it. While the roots of AI seemed to be nothing more than fun and conversation, the goals were simple tasks that were easily identified to create the technology. Today’s AI is advancing at a high rate with the intention of making our everyday lives easier.