Dawn of AI
The 1956 Dartmouth workshop gave the field its name and its outsized ambitions. Early programs like the Logic Theorist, ELIZA, and Shakey the Robot dazzled observers and convinced researchers that human-level AI was just years away. Generous government funding flowed freely as optimism reached fever pitch.
A small workshop at Dartmouth College coined the term 'artificial intelligence' and launched an entire field of research.
A Cornell psychologist built the first neural network hardware, sparking a media frenzy and a dream that machines could truly learn.
Arthur Samuel's self-improving checkers program coined the term 'machine learning' and proved a computer could surpass its own creator.
John McCarthy invented LISP, a radical programming language built on pure mathematics that became the lingua franca of artificial intelligence research for three decades.
In 1961, a 4,000-pound mechanical arm named Unimate became the first industrial robot to work on an assembly line, forever changing manufacturing.
IBM's Shoebox demonstrated real-time speech recognition at the 1962 World's Fair, showing the public that machines could listen and respond to human voices.
Stanford researchers built the first expert system, proving machines could rival specialists by encoding scientific knowledge as rules.
A simple pattern-matching program fooled people into pouring out their hearts to a machine, revealing unsettling truths about human psychology.
SRI International built Shakey, the first mobile robot that could perceive its environment, plan a sequence of actions, and reason about how to carry them out — proving machines could operate autonomously in the real world.
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey introduced audiences to a terrifyingly calm artificial intelligence, shaping public fears and expectations about AI for decades.
Minsky and Papert's rigorous mathematical critique of perceptrons convinced a generation of researchers to abandon neural networks, triggering a funding drought that lasted over a decade.