Articles
Narrative overviews and thematic deep dives tracing the full arc of AI history — from the ancient dream of artificial life to the modern explosion that changed everything.
Act 1: The Dream
Before computers existed, humans were already imagining them
The Ancient Dream of Artificial Life
Part I · The Dream
From the bronze giant Talos to the clay Golem — how ancient civilisations dreamed of artificial life thousands of years before…
Read more →Clockwork Wonders: The Automata Era
Part I · The Dream
Before electricity, craftsmen across Europe built mechanical marvels that walked, wrote, played music, and digested food. The…
Read more →The Philosophers Who Asked "Can Machines Think?"
Part I · The Dream
Before the engineers came the philosophers. Leibniz dreamed of a calculus of thought. Pascal built the first calculator. The…
Read more →Ada Lovelace & The First Algorithm
Part I · The Dream
Going deeper into the actual mathematics of the Notes on the Analytical Engine, what the Bernoulli number algorithm actually did,…
Read more →Alan Turing: The Man Who Imagined Everything
Part I · The Dream
The full narrative arc of Turing's intellectual journey — from the Turing Machine to Bletchley Park to the 1950 paper to…
Read more →Act 2: The Birth
AI gets its name — and its first wild promises
The Summer That Named AI
Part II · The Birth
The 1956 Dartmouth Conference — who was in the room, what they argued about, what they got right, and what they got…
Read more →The First AI Programs: Teaching Machines to Play Games
Part II · The Birth
Arthur Samuel's checkers program, early chess AI, and the first signs that machines could learn. The exhilarating early years.
Read more →ELIZA and the Illusion of Understanding
Part II · The Birth
Joseph Weizenbaum's 1966 chatbot fooled everyone — including people who knew it was a program. The story of ELIZA and what its…
Read more →The Optimists: When AI Was Going to Solve Everything
Part II · The Birth
The bold 1960s predictions, the government funding, and the intoxicating early hype. What made the founders of AI so confident.
Read more →The First AI Winter: When the Dream Crashed
Part II · The Birth
The Lighthill Report, the funding cuts, the broken promises — and why the first era of AI collapsed.
Read more →Act 3: The Comeback
AI refuses to die — and quietly reinvents itself
Expert Systems: AI Learns to Be a Specialist
Part III · The Comeback
How 1980s AI ditched general thinking and got smart by going narrow. MYCIN, XCON, and thousands of corporate AI systems.
Read more →Japan's Billion-Dollar Bet on AI
Part III · The Comeback
The Fifth Generation Computer Project — the most audacious AI programme in history, the global panic it triggered, and the…
Read more →The Second AI Winter: Lightning Strikes Twice
Part III · The Comeback
The Lisp machine collapse, the DARPA funding cuts, the death of expert systems — and the stubborn few who kept working on neural…
Read more →The Godfathers Go Underground
Part III · The Comeback
How Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio kept working on neural networks through years of rejection — and why their stubbornness was one of…
Read more →Deep Blue vs. Kasparov: The Match That Shook the World
Part III · The Comeback
The 1997 chess showdown that the world watched. The full story of both matches, the controversy, and why it felt like a cultural…
Read more →Act 4: The Revolution
The ingredients for modern AI quietly come together
The Internet Feeds the Beast
Part IV · The Revolution
How billions of web pages, images, and user clicks became the fuel that AI had always needed but never had. The quiet data…
Read more →The ImageNet Moment: 2012
Part IV · The Revolution
The AlexNet breakthrough that most people missed — and why experts say the 2012 ImageNet competition was the most important…
Read more →Google, Facebook & the AI Arms Race
Part IV · The Revolution
How tech giants quietly hired every AI researcher alive and turbo-charged the field. Google Brain, Facebook AI Research, DeepMind.
Read more →AlphaGo: The Game No Computer Was Supposed to Win
Part IV · The Revolution
DeepMind's 2016 victory at Go — the ancient game that experts said would never fall to a machine. Move 37, and what it meant.
Read more →Alexa, Siri & The AI That Entered Your Home
Part IV · The Revolution
How voice assistants brought AI into everyday life — the technology behind them, and the gap between the demo and the reality.
Read more →Act 5: The Explosion
AI stops being a tool and starts being a conversation
The Transformer: The Paper That Runs the World
Part V · The Explosion
"Attention Is All You Need" — the 2017 Google paper that introduced the transformer architecture. The engine inside every major…
Read more →The GPT Era: Language Models Take Over
Part V · The Explosion
GPT-1 through GPT-4 — how language models evolved from curiosities to genuinely eerie capabilities, and the moment researchers…
Read more →The ChatGPT Moment: The Day the World Noticed
Part V · The Explosion
November 2022. One hundred million users in sixty days. The product that divided history into before and after.
Read more →The Great AI Debate: Hopes, Fears & Open Questions
Part V · The Explosion
The job displacement debate. The bias problem. Existential risk. Regulation. The brilliant people on every side of every argument.
Read more →What Comes Next: The Open Story of AI
Part V · The Explosion
Where we are, what is on the horizon, and why the most important chapters may not yet be written. A closing synthesis of the…
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