History of AI

The field of computer science known as artificial intelligence is focused on developing

computers that can mimic human intelligence and problem-solving skills. In order to simplify and
advance in the future, they accomplish this by ingesting a vast amount of data, processing it, and
learning from the past. A typical computer software would require human intervention to rectify errors
and enhance workflow.

1921: Czech playwright Karel Čapek released a science fiction play “Rossum’s Universal Robots”
which introduced the idea of “artificial people” which he named robots. This was the first known use of
the word.

1929: Japanese professor Makoto Nishimura built the first Japanese robot, named Gakutensoku.

1949: Computer scientist Edmund Callis Berkley published the book “Giant Brains, or Machines
that Think” which compared the newer models of computers to human brains.

This range of time was when the interest in AI really came to a head. Alan Turing published his
work “Computer Machinery and Intelligence” which eventually became The Turing Test, which experts
used to measure computer intelligence. The term “artificial intelligence” was coined and came into
popular use.

1950: Alan Turing published “Computer Machinery and Intelligence” which proposed a test of
machine intelligence called The Imitation Game.

1952: A computer scientist named Arthur Samuel developed a program to play checkers, which
is the first to ever learn the game independently.

1955: John McCarthy held a workshop at Dartmouth on “artificial intelligence” which is the first
use of the word, and how it came into popular usage.

The time between when the phrase “artificial intelligence” was created, and the 1980s was a
period of both rapid growth and struggle for AI research. The late 1950s through the 1960s was a time
of creation. From programming languages that are still in use to this day to books and films that
explored the idea of robots, AI became a mainstream idea quickly.

The 1970s showed similar improvements, such as the first anthropomorphic robot being built in
Japan, to the first example of an autonomous vehicle being built by an engineering grad student.
However, it was also a time of struggle for AI research, as the U.S. government showed little interest in
continuing to fund AI research.

1958: John McCarthy created LISP (acronym for List Processing), the first programming language
for AI research, which is still in popular use to this day.
 1959: Arthur Samuel created the term “machine learning” when doing a speech about teaching
machines to play chess better than the humans who programmed them.

1961: The first industrial robot Unimate started working on an assembly line at General Motors
in New Jersey, tasked with transporting die casings and welding parts on cars (which was deemed too
dangerous for humans).

1965: Edward Feigenbaum and Joshua Lederberg created the first “expert system” which was a
form of AI programmed to replicate the thinking and decision-making abilities of human experts.

1966: Joseph Weizenbaum created the first “chatterbot” (later shortened to chatbot), ELIZA, a
mock psychotherapist, that used natural language processing (NLP) to converse with humans.1968:
Soviet mathematician Alexey Ivakhnenko published “Group Method of Data Handling” in the journal
“Avtomatika,” which proposed a new approach to AI that would later become what we now know as
“Deep Learning.”

1973: An applied mathematician named James Lighthill gave a report to the British Science
Council, underlining that strides were not as impressive as those that had been promised by scientists,
which led to much-reduced support and funding for AI research from the British government.

1979: James L. Adams created The Standford Cart in 1961, which became one of the first
examples of an autonomous vehicle. In ‘79, it successfully navigated a room full of chairs without human
interference.

1979: The American Association of Artificial Intelligence which is now known as the Association
for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) was founded.

Most of the 1980s showed a period of rapid growth and interest in AI, now labeled as the “AI
boom.” This came from both breakthroughs in research, and additional government funding to support
the researchers. Deep Learning techniques and the use of Expert System became more popular, both of
which allowed computers to learn from their mistakes and make independent decisions.

Notable dates in this time period include:

1980: First conference of the AAAI was held at Stanford.

1980: The first expert system came into the commercial market, known as XCON (expert
configurer). It was designed to assist in the ordering of computer systems by automatically picking
components based on the customer’s needs.

1981: The Japanese government allocated $850 million (over $2 billion dollars in today’s money)
to the Fifth Generation Computer project. Their aim was to create computers that could translate,
converse in human language, and express reasoning on a human level.
 1984: The AAAI warns of an incoming “AI Winter” where funding and interest would decrease,
and make research significantly more difficult.

1985: An autonomous drawing program known as AARON is demonstrated at the AAAI

conference.

1986: Ernst Dickmann and his team at Bundeswehr University of Munich created and
demonstrated the first driverless car (or robot car). It could drive up to 55 mph on roads that didn’t have
other obstacles or human drivers.

1987: Commercial launch of Alacrity by Alactrious Inc. Alacrity was the first strategy managerial
advisory system, and used a complex expert system with 3,000+ rules.

1987: The market for specialized LISP-based hardware collapsed due to cheaper and more
accessible competitors that could run LISP software, including those offered by IBM and Apple. This
caused many specialized LISP companies to fail as the technology was now easily accessible.

1988: A computer programmer named Rollo Carpenter invented the chatbot Jabberwacky,
which he programmed to provide interesting and entertaining conversation to humans.

Despite the lack of funding during the AI Winter, the early 90s showed some impressive strides
forward in AI research, including the introduction of the first AI system that could beat a reigning world
champion chess player. This era also introduced AI into everyday life via innovations such as the first
Roomba and the first commercially-available speech recognition software on Windows computers.

The surge in interest was followed by a surge in funding for research, which allowed even more
progress to be made.

1997: Deep Blue (developed by IBM) beat the world chess champion, Gary Kasparov, in a highly-
publicized match, becoming the first program to beat a human chess champion.

1997: Windows released a speech recognition software (developed by Dragon Systems).

2000: Professor Cynthia Breazeal developed the first robot that could simulate human emotions
with its face,which included eyes, eyebrows, ears, and a mouth. It was called Kismet.

2002: The first Roomba was released.

2003: Nasa landed two rovers onto Mars (Spirit and Opportunity) and they navigated the
surface of the planet without human intervention.

2006: Companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Netflix started utilizing AI as a part of their
advertising and user experience (UX) algorithms.

2010: Microsoft launched the Xbox 360 Kinect, the first gaming hardware designed to track body
movement and translate it into gaming directions.

2011: An NLP computer programmed to answer questions named Watson (created by IBM) won
Jeopardy against two former champions in a televised game.
 2011: Apple released Siri, the first popular virtual assistant.

That brings us to the most recent developments in AI, up to the present day. We’ve seen a surge
in common-use AI tools, such as virtual assistants, search engines, etc. This time period also popularized
Deep Learning and Big Data..

2012: Two researchers from Google (Jeff Dean and Andrew Ng) trained a neural network to
recognize cats by showing it unlabeled images and no background information.

2015: Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Steve Wozniak (and over 3,000 others) signed an open
letter to the worlds’ government systems banning the development of (and later, use of) autonomous
weapons for purposes of war.

2016: Hanson Robotics created a humanoid robot named Sophia, who became known as the
first “robot citizen” and was the first robot created with a realistic human appearance and the ability to
see and replicate emotions, as well as to communicate.

2017: Facebook programmed two AI chatbots to converse and learn how to negotiate, but as
they went back and forth they ended up forgoing English and developing their own language,
completely autonomously.

2018: A Chinese tech group called Alibaba’s language-processing AI beat human intellect on a
Stanford reading and comprehension test.

2019: Google’s AlphaStar reached Grandmaster on the video game StarCraft 2, outperforming
all but .2% of human players.

2020: OpenAI started beta testing GPT-3, a model that uses Deep Learning to create code,
poetry, and other such language and writing tasks. While not the first of its kind, it is the first that
creates content almost indistinguishable from those created by humans.

2021: OpenAI developed DALL-E, which can process and understand images enough to produce
accurate captions, moving AI one step closer to understanding the visual world.

REFERENCES

https://www.tableau.com/data-insights/ai/history#:~:text=Birth%20of%20AI%3A
%201950%2D1956&text=Alan%20Turing%20published%20his%20work,and%20came%20into
%20popular%20use.