Long-form history for curious people
The story of artificial intelligence, properly told.
Deep dives into the history of AI — through narratives, profiles, and pivotal events. No summaries. No hot takes. Just the full story.
The Logic Theorist, 1956: The First AI Program
On a winter night in 1955, a program running on a primitive computer proved a mathematical theorem for the first time in history. Its creators believed they had cracked the secret of human intelligence. They were wrong about that — but right about something more important. The full story of the Logic Theorist: the first AI program ever built.
The Philosophers Who Asked 'Can Machines Think?'
Before the engineers came the philosophers. Leibniz dreamed of a calculus of thought. Pascal built the first mechanical calculator. Descartes asked whether mechanism had limits. The thinkers who laid the conceptual groundwork for everything that followed — and the questions they left unanswered that we are still wrestling with today.
The Turing Test, 1950: The Question That Still Has No Answer
In October 1950, a mathematician published a thirty-page paper in a philosophy journal that asked a deceptively simple question: can machines think? The paper proposed a test. The test sparked a debate. The debate has never ended. This is the story of the most important thought experiment in the history of AI.
The Dartmouth Conference, 1956: The Summer AI Was Born
In the summer of 1956, ten men gathered at a small New Hampshire college and gave a name to the dream of thinking machines. They were wildly overconfident, occasionally wrong, and completely right about the one thing that mattered most. This is the story of the week Artificial Intelligence was born.
Clockwork Wonders: The Automata Era
Before computers, before electricity, before Ada Lovelace wrote the first program — craftsmen across Europe built mechanical marvels that walked, wrote, played music, and digested food. The extraordinary story of the automata era and the question it forced the world to ask.
John von Neumann: The Man Who Designed the Modern Computer
He spoke eight languages, memorized entire books, and solved differential equations in his head for fun. He designed the architecture every computer in the world still uses today, helped build the atomic bomb, and died at fifty-three still dictating equations from his hospital bed. The astonishing, troubling, irreplaceable life of John von Neumann.
“History is not the past. It is the story of how we became who we are — and the only honest guide we have to where we are going.”
Minds & Machines: The Story of AI is published by ishistory. No summaries. No hot takes. Just the full story, told properly.
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