The Story Behind the Screen
Every device has a history.
Every invention has a story.
isHistory traces the ideas, people, and moments that built the technology you use every day — serialized, in-depth, and built for readers who want more than a Wikipedia summary.
Featured
Read the series →The Ancient Dream of Artificial Life
From Talos and the Golem to Mary Shelley — how humans dreamed of artificial life thousands of years before the computer. The deep roots of AI in myth, philosophy, and the craftsman's obsession with creating minds.
Minds & Machines · A15The Rise of the Thinking Machine: Deep Learning Takes Over
The story of the deep learning revolution from AlexNet through the Transformer, told as a narrative of rapid, cascading discovery. The fastest scientific revolution in the history of AI — and what it means that machines can now do what only humans could do before.
Series
All series →Minds & Machines
A 78-article deep-dive into the full history of Artificial Intelligence — from the ancient myths of mechanical life to the reasoning models reshaping the world today. Three parallel tracks (Articles, Profiles, Events) across five acts, plus a three-article coda. Series complete.
Series · OngoingWired
A 116-episode narrative history of the internet — from ARPANET's first message in 1969 to the AI web of 2025. Five parallel tracks (Chronicle, Pioneers, Episodes, Consequences, Life & Culture) across seven chronological eras tell the story of how a military communications experiment became the nervous system of civilization.
Latest articles
Nick Bostrom: Superintelligence & the FHI
Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence (2014) and the Future of Humanity Institute — how long-termist AI safety shaped OpenAI and Anthropic's founding.
Beyond the SeriesPaul Christiano: RLHF & AI Alignment Research
Paul Christiano — the Alignment Research Center founder who turned RLHF into the dominant alignment paradigm and shaped AI policy from inside.
Beyond the SeriesChinchilla, March 2022: The Compute-Optimal Reset
Chinchilla — DeepMind's March 2022 compute-optimal scaling paper that reversed Kaplan's recipe (more data, smaller models) and reset training strategy.
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Beyond the Series
Standalone essays extending isHistory's series — the topics, profiles, and events the main series couldn't fully treat. Each piece is designed to be read on its own.
Primary-Source ReferenceDocs Catalog
Verified documents, papers, reports, and legislation with canonical source URLs — the primary sources behind the series, each explained in plain English.
Standalone WritingBlog
Essays and field notes on the history of technology — the people, the moments, and the machines. Written when there's something to say, not on a schedule.
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