Minds & Machines
The Story of AI
From ancient myths of artificial life to the ChatGPT revolution — the complete narrative history of Artificial Intelligence, told across 75 articles, ~600,000 words, and three interconnected tracks.
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The story of AI told through three interconnected lenses
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The Ancient Dream of Artificial Life
From the bronze giant Talos to the clay Golem — how ancient civilisations dreamed of artificial life thousands of years before the computer …
Clockwork Wonders: The Automata Era
Before electricity, craftsmen across Europe built mechanical marvels that walked, wrote, played music, and digested food. The extraordinary …
The Philosophers Who Asked "Can Machines Think?"
Before the engineers came the philosophers. Leibniz dreamed of a calculus of thought. Pascal built the first calculator. The thinkers who la…
Ada Lovelace: The First Programmer the World Forgot
She wrote the world's first computer program in 1843 — for a machine that didn't exist yet. Then history forgot her for a hundred years.…
Alan Turing: The Man Who Invented the Future
He broke the Nazi's unbreakable code, designed the architecture of the modern computer, asked whether machines could think — and was destroy…
John von Neumann: The Man Who Designed the Modern Computer
He spoke eight languages, memorised entire books, designed the architecture every computer still uses today, and helped build the atomic bom…
The Dartmouth Conference, 1956: The Summer AI Was Born
Who was in the room, what they argued about, what they got right, what they got catastrophically wrong — and why giving a field a name was o…
The Turing Test, 1950: The Question That Still Has No Answer
The paper, the test, the nine objections Turing answered himself, ELIZA, the Chinese Room, and why seventy-five years later the question has…
The Logic Theorist, 1956: The First AI Program
The night Newell and Simon's program proved mathematical theorems — and why they believed they had cracked human intelligence.…
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We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.
— Alan Turing, 1950