AI for Everybody - Lesson 3
What Is This Thing? A Short, Honest History
This is the field’s third or fourth resurrection. People declared it dead, with funding obituaries in serious publications, more than once. The version of AI that is in your phone right now sits on top of seventy years of false starts, busted hype, two famous winters, and one quiet 2012 result that almost nobody outside the field noticed for several years.
You do not need to know that history to use a chatbot. You need to know it to read the headlines about chatbots without being played. Most articles about “the AI revolution” are written by people who have never read a paragraph about the AI revolution of the 1980s. The same shape of optimism and the same shape of disappointment has happened before. Naming the pattern is what this lesson is for.
