History and Hype of Artificial Intelligence

UWM Professor Thomas Haigh contends that the history of AI is the history of an overhyped brand that has only very recently come to signify a set of deployable technologies with broad applications and clear, if somewhat horrifying, purposes. For almost 70 years, AI has been attached to a range of loosely related projects, none of which have yet come close to delivering on the promise of creating computer systems with human-like intelligence. One insider characterized the story of AI as “the history of failed ideas.” Yet in the process of failing, early AI researchers made vital but incidental contributions to the development of computer technology and computer science. Learn about the history of “artificial intelligence” and both the rhetoric and actual practice of artificial intelligence as it institutionalized through research labs, curricula, textbooks and professional associations leading up to the most current breakthroughs in AI.