Artificial intelligence is unusual in so many ways. One unique aspect of artificial intelligence is that it has a verifiable birthday. Most sciences don’t.
Physics didn’t begin on a Tuesday. Biology doesn’t have an anniversary. They each unfolded slowly, across centuries and centuries of people noticing things, arguing about them, and worrying about them. AI is decidedly different. It started on a specific day, at a specific university campus, because a specific person decided it should. Monday, June 18, 1956. That makes the field seventy years old today. Or 70 years young.
That morning was the first day of an eight-week workshop at Dartmouth College, in the pretty town of Hanover, New Hampshire. The point of the gathering wasn’t to study artificial intelligence. It was to invent it. A young assistant professor named John McCarthy called a small group of colleagues from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom to New Hampshire and asked them to help him build a machine that could think. He needed a name for the thing they were chasing. He picked two words that had never really sat next to each other before. Artificial intelligence.
I missed almost sixty of those seventy years. I didn’t start paying real attention to artificial intelligence until 2015.
By December of 2016 I was standing in front of the Arizona Association of REALTORS® giving my first talk on AI. I opened those talks the same way every time, with a timeline. Not of AI. Of change itself. I illustrated how long each major technology held the field before the next one unseated it. Millennia, at first. Then centuries. Then decades. Then years. You could visualize the gap closing. It was on purpose. It was designed to stop being a history lesson and become a warning. This AI thing was going to explode. I was sure of it.
I spent the years that followed playing with the early transformer-based tools, watching them get unnervingly good. In July of 2022, I wrote that machines could already produce writing at scale, that it was a present reality and not a someday thing. Five months later, on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT launched, and I was as shocked as everyone else.
I keep returning to that day. I saw the curve coming. I built on the early tools. And the explosion still blew me away when it landed. Seeing something approach and being floored by it anyway is a strange feeling. Both things can be true at the same time. I know many who feel the same way.
So I was concerned earlier than most. And I was also intrigued to the point of distraction. Today I’m still struggling to understand what feelings to trust, both concerned and hopeful.
AI is seventy years old today. It feels like a toddler.
The illustration of the cover of the Dartmouth proposal is from this article: The Research Conference Where AI Began
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