An untidy history of AI across four books
The history of artificial intelligence (AI) cannot be separated entirely from the general development of technologies that go back to the ancient world. Like the abacus, the machines we today call AI reproduce and automate our formal and cognitive abilities, albeit at higher levels of generality. More officially, AI research began in the postwar era with the “symbolic” paradigm, which sought to program human faculties such as logic, knowledge, ontology, and semantics within software architecture. It was harder than it sounds. Despite the inveterate optimism of the broader field, the symbolic approach encountered major logistical and conceptual limitations, and by the turn of the century had begun to stagnate. A competing approach, machine learning, developed algorithms that,…
