Topic
8 articles explore this thread.
A short, source-backed overview of The Long Human Road to AI Season 1, showing how computers and AI emerged from older human patterns and what readers will learn across seven articles and this overview.
A general-reader history of the learning turn in AI, from Samuel's checkers and Rosenblatt's perceptron to ImageNet and AlexNet, with caveats about generalization and understanding.
AI systems are social arrangements, not just technical artifacts. This article explores labor, governance, education, access, and trust as the human systems that shape what AI becomes and who benefits.
Foundation models revived the ambition of general-purpose AI. This article traces the transformer, pretraining, scaling, post-training, multimodality, and tool use—and why broad capability is not reliable understanding.
A readable walk from Boole and Frege through computability, switching circuits, information theory, and cybernetics, showing how formal ideas made later computing and AI legible.
How the 1956 Dartmouth workshop named and organized artificial intelligence, what early symbolic systems actually demonstrated, and why the era's optimism both helped and overpromised.
A narrative history of calculation before electronics: human computers, abaci, Napier's rods, mechanical calculators, automata, Jacquard cards, and Babbage's engines.
A history of AI winters and expert systems shows that intelligence claims survive only when they meet grounded tests, maintenance plans, and institution-aware deployment criteria.