From Cold War brain fantasies to chatbots that flirt back, this is the messy, hype-fuelled, very human history of artificial intelligence.
Banner image courtesy of Andy Kelly
Artificial intelligence didn’t start with email drafts and calendar reminders. It started with scientists wondering if they could build a thinking machine, and everyone else wondering how long it would take before it tried to end us. We’ve been trapped somewhere between ego and fear ever since.
The modern AI origin story usually begins in the 1950s, when mathematicians and computer scientists—fresh off World War II and drunk on logic—decided the human brain was basically fancy maths. Alan Turing kicked the whole thing off in the 1950s by asking a question: can machines think? His logic was, if you’re talking to something through a screen and you can’t tell whether it’s a person or a machine, then the machine is winning.
This became the Turing Test, aka the first time a man tried to get a computer to pass as a person online—decades before catfishing.
By the 1960s, researchers were convinced human-level AI was about five years away. (This will become a recurring delusion.) Governments threw money at the problem like it was the Space Race. One early star was ELIZA, a chatbot pretending to be a therapist. It mostly repeated users’ sentences back to them, which—ironically—made people feel deeply understood.
Then came the first AI winter. Turns out “thinking like a human” is harder than expected, especially when computers had the processing power of a microwaved potato. Funding dried up. Promises were broken. Researchers quietly pivoted to other jobs.
The cycle restarted in the 1990s when computers got faster. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue beat chess champion Garry Kasparov, triggering a collective human meltdown. If a machine could beat us at chess—our most smug, intellectual board game—what was next? Poetry? Love? Taxes?
Spoiler: yes, kind of.
The 2010s ushered in machine learning, neural networks, and the belief that if you feed a computer enough data, it will eventually develop something resembling intelligence. Big Tech entered the chat. Algorithms started recommending your music, your news, your lovers. Suddenly AI wasn’t a lab experiment; it was deciding what you were consuming, and when.
Then came generative AI: systems that write, draw, talk, flirt, hallucinate, and occasionally lie with confidence. Companies like OpenAI released tools like ChatGPT.
AI today is neither a god nor a demon. It’s more like a mirror—reflecting our obsessions, biases, laziness, and desire to automate literally everything except emotional growth. The machines aren’t coming for us. We’re building them in our image. Which, frankly, should worry everyone.
Sleep tight. 🤖