The History of AI
Seventy years of promises, winters, and revivals.
Sixty years of promises, winters, and revivals. The course reads AI as a discipline with a history, not as a genre invented in 2022 — because the winters name the specific technical failures that the present must not repeat.
The Scholar leaves able to place the current moment in a longer arc, and to read papers from each era on their own terms.
- 01
Trace the field from Turing to reasoning models.
- 02
Name the winters and their specific technical causes.
- 03
Distinguish the present moment from prior peaks.
- 04
Read a paper from each era on its own terms.
- — Curiosity; no coding required.
~4 hours.
- IModule
Origins
The founding questions.
- IIModule
Symbolic AI and Expert Systems
The first two waves.
- IIIModule
Statistical learning
The quiet decade.
- IVModule
The deep-learning revolution
The third wave.
- VModule
The foundation-model era
Where we are.
You cannot judge the present of a field whose past you have not read.