Schools brief | Artificial intelligence

A short history of AI

In the first of six weekly briefs, we ask how AI overcame decades of underdelivering

A fish turning into a computer referring to the evolution theory applied to technology and AI.
image: Mike Haddad

Over the summer of 1956 a small but illustrious group gathered at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire; it included Claude Shannon, the begetter of information theory, and Herb Simon, the only person ever to win both the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Turing Award awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery. They had been called together by a young researcher, John McCarthy, who wanted to discuss “how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts” and “solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans”. It was the first academic gathering devoted to what McCarthy dubbed “artificial intelligence”. And it set a template for the field’s next 60-odd years in coming up with no advances on a par with its ambitions.

Explore more

This article appeared in the Schools brief section of the print edition under the headline “A short history of AI”

When markets ignore politics

From the July 20th 2024 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

More from Schools brief

The race is on to control the global supply chain for AI chips

The focus is no longer just on faster chips, but on more chips clustered together

AI firms will soon exhaust most of the internet’s data

Can they create more?


Finding living planets

Life evolves on planets. And planets with life evolve


On the origin of “species”

The term, though widely used, is hard to define

Making your way in the world

An individual’s life story is a dance to the music of time

How organisms are organised

Like any well-run operation, a body is made of specialised parts