A History of Artificial Intelligence
Eleven essays tracing artificial intelligence from logic and relay circuits through expert systems, statistical learning, neural networks, transformers, and the present argument over what AI is for.
11 parts
Reading Order
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When Machines Learned to Choose
From Boolean logic and relay circuits to machines that could act on conditions.
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When the Theory Ran Ahead of the World
Dartmouth, the perceptron, and the first ambitions of a named field.
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The First Winter
Why early promises outran hardware, data, and theory.
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The Rule-Based Interregnum
Expert systems made knowledge explicit—and exposed the cost of maintaining it.
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The Second Winter
The commercial collapse that cleared the way for a different kind of AI.
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Simple Rules, Surprising Worlds
Artificial life, emergence, and the discovery that complexity need not be designed.
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Let the Data Decide
How statistical learning displaced hand-written rules.
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Neurons All the Way Down
Backpropagation, deep learning, and the return of connectionism.
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Attention Is All You Need
Transformers, language models, and the architecture behind the current boom.
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The Naming Problem
Why successful AI so often stops being called AI.
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What We Do Now
What the field's seventy-year record suggests about governing the systems we have.