Minds & Machines
The Story of AI
From ancient myths of artificial life to the ChatGPT revolution — the complete narrative history of Artificial Intelligence, told across 75 planned articles, ~600,000 planned words, and three interconnected tracks.
Explore the Series
The story of AI told through three interconnected lenses
Latest Published
Start here with the articles currently available
The Ancient Dream of Artificial Life
From the bronze giant Talos to the clay Golem — how ancient civilisations dreamed of artificial life thousands of years before the computer…
Clockwork Wonders: The Automata Era
Before electricity, craftsmen across Europe built mechanical marvels that walked, wrote, played music, and digested food. The extraordinary…
The Philosophers Who Asked "Can Machines Think?"
Before the engineers came the philosophers. Leibniz dreamed of a calculus of thought. Pascal built the first calculator. The thinkers who…
Ada Lovelace & The First Algorithm
Going deeper into the actual mathematics of the Notes on the Analytical Engine, what the Bernoulli number algorithm actually did, and why…
Alan Turing: The Man Who Imagined Everything
The full narrative arc of Turing's intellectual journey — from the Turing Machine to Bletchley Park to the 1950 paper to morphogenesis.
The Summer That Named AI
The 1956 Dartmouth Conference — who was in the room, what they argued about, what they got right, and what they got catastrophically wrong.
The First AI Programs: Teaching Machines to Play Games
Arthur Samuel's checkers program, early chess AI, and the first signs that machines could learn. The exhilarating early years.
ELIZA and the Illusion of Understanding
Joseph Weizenbaum's 1966 chatbot fooled everyone — including people who knew it was a program. The story of ELIZA and what its reception…
The Optimists: When AI Was Going to Solve Everything
The bold 1960s predictions, the government funding, and the intoxicating early hype. What made the founders of AI so confident.
The First AI Winter: When the Dream Crashed
The Lighthill Report, the funding cuts, the broken promises — and why the first era of AI collapsed.
Expert Systems: AI Learns to Be a Specialist
How 1980s AI ditched general thinking and got smart by going narrow. MYCIN, XCON, and thousands of corporate AI systems.
Japan's Billion-Dollar Bet on AI
The Fifth Generation Computer Project — the most audacious AI programme in history, the global panic it triggered, and the spectacular…
The Second AI Winter: Lightning Strikes Twice
The Lisp machine collapse, the DARPA funding cuts, the death of expert systems — and the stubborn few who kept working on neural networks.
Ada Lovelace: The First Programmer the World Forgot
She wrote the world's first computer program in 1843 — for a machine that didn't exist yet. Then history forgot her for a hundred years.
Alan Turing: The Man Who Invented the Future
He broke the Nazi's unbreakable code, designed the architecture of the modern computer, asked whether machines could think — and was…
John von Neumann: The Man Who Designed the Modern Computer
He spoke eight languages, memorised entire books, designed the architecture every computer still uses today, and helped build the atomic…
Norbert Wiener: The Father of Cybernetics
The forgotten genius who invented cybernetics and first warned the world about machines replacing humans — in 1950. Why nobody listened.
Claude Shannon: The Man Who Invented Information
One Bell Labs engineer created information theory and gave AI its mathematical language. His 1948 paper is the most important paper in the…
John McCarthy: The Man Who Named AI
The Dartmouth organiser, the inventor of LISP, the man who gave artificial intelligence its name — and the complicated legacy of a founder.
Marvin Minsky: The Brilliant Optimist Who Got It Wrong
His towering influence, his wildly overconfident predictions, and how he accidentally helped cause the first AI winter.
Newell & Simon: The Dynamic Duo of Early AI
The Logic Theorist, the General Problem Solver, and two men who genuinely believed in 1955 that they had cracked human intelligence.
Joseph Weizenbaum: The Man Who Built ELIZA and Regretted It
How creating the world's first chatbot turned its creator into AI's most passionate critic.
Frank Rosenblatt: The Forgotten Father of Neural Networks
The Perceptron, the media frenzy, the crushing dismissal by Minsky — and a legacy that took fifty years to be vindicated.
Geoffrey Hinton: The Stubborn Godfather
Decades of rejection, the backpropagation breakthrough, and the man who built the foundation of modern AI — then quit Google to warn the…
Yann LeCun: The Rebel with a Vision
Convolutional neural networks, his battles with the AI establishment, and the architect of Meta's AI empire.
Yoshua Bengio: The Conscience of AI
The third Godfather — his deep learning contributions, his evolution from pure researcher to AI safety advocate.
The Dartmouth Conference, 1956: The Summer AI Was Born
Who was in the room, what they argued about, what they got right, what they got catastrophically wrong — and why giving a field a name was…
The Turing Test, 1950: The Question That Still Has No Answer
The paper, the test, the nine objections Turing answered himself, ELIZA, the Chinese Room, and why seventy-five years later the question…
The Logic Theorist, 1956: The First AI Program
The night Newell and Simon's program proved mathematical theorems — and why they believed they had cracked human intelligence.
ELIZA, 1966: The Chatbot That Made People Cry
A simple pattern-matching program accidentally became the world's most intimate conversationalist. The story of the first chatbot — and…
The Lighthill Report, 1973: The Document That Killed AI
How one British mathematician's critical review caused governments worldwide to pull AI funding and sent the field into its first winter.
The First AI Winter, 1974–1980: The Great Disillusionment
The funding collapse, the broken promises, the researchers who lost their jobs — and the underground survivors who kept the flame alive.
The Rise of Expert Systems, 1980: AI Gets a Job
How MYCIN, XCON, and thousands of corporate AI systems made real money by going narrow. The comeback story — and the seeds of the next…
Japan's Fifth Generation Project, 1982: The Billion-Dollar Gamble
The most audacious AI project in history, the global panic it triggered, and its quiet, spectacular failure.
The Second AI Winter, 1987–1993: Lightning Strikes Twice
The Lisp machine market collapse, DARPA funding cuts, the death of expert systems — and the second time the world gave up on AI.
Backpropagation Goes Mainstream, 1986: The Algorithm That Refused to Die
How Hinton, Rumelhart, and Williams revived a buried idea and planted the seed for everything that came after.
Deep Blue vs. Kasparov, 1997: The Match the World Watched
The full story of both matches, the controversy, Kasparov's accusations of cheating, and what it meant for AI — and for what it means to be…
The Netflix Prize, 2006: The Moment the Crowd Beat the Experts
How a $1 million open competition accelerated machine learning by a decade and established the template for AI research.
The ImageNet Project, 2009: Teaching Machines to See
How Fei-Fei Li assembled 14 million labelled images — and why that dataset became the launching pad for modern AI.
Series Status
We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.
— Alan Turing, 1950