1950

Alan Turing, a founding father of artificial intelligence and modern cognitive science, releases his provocative 1950 essay, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence".

One of his most famous questions was:

"I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'. This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms 'machine' and 'think.'"

1952

In March 1952 Turing was convicted of “gross indecency” (homosexuality, which was a crime in Britain at the time) and was sentenced to 12 months of hormone “therapy.”

1956

The term “Artificial Intelligence” was coined at the Dartmouth Conference.

1960s - 1980s

“Good old-fashioned AI” (GOFAI) or “symbolicism” developed in order to attempt describing intelligence in symbolic terms.

"Since a computer is nothing more than a universal symbol system, this is the claim that computers are the right kind of machines to think."

1997

IBM’s Deep Blue beat a world chess champion, showcasing raw computational power.

“Big Blue’s victory in the six-game marathon against Garry Kasparov marked an inflection point in computing, heralding a future in which supercomputers and artificial intelligence could simulate human thinking.”

2010s - 2020s

AI advanced rapidly due to big data and faster hardware, enabling facial recognition, language generation, autonomous vehicles, social media algorithms, and more.

2022 - present

Generative AI (like ChatGPT, Gemini) entered the mainstream, creating human-like text, images, code, and audio.

A Brief History of AI