TIMELINE OF AI

1921-Possible Future

1921

The word “Robot” first appeared when Karel Čapek released his Rossum’s Universal Robots and used it to describe artificial humans.

1950

Alan Turing proposed the concept of machine intelligence, as well as the Turing Test, published in his 1950 paper - Computer Machinery and Intelligence. He proposed a practical way to evaluate whether a machine could think.

1955

John McCarthy proposed the 1956 Dartmouth Summer research Project on Artificial Intelligence. In this proposal he introduced AI for the first time, bringing the term into common use.

1956

The official birth of AI. John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Claude Shanon, and Nathaniel Rochester gathered for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project, laying the foundation for artificial intelligence as a new field of study.

Creation of LISP (by John McCarthy), the first programming language designed specifically for AI

1958

1965

The first successful “expert system” was developed, a software designed to imitate the reasoning process of human specialists.

1973

The first AI winter. James Lighthill wrote a report for the British government arguing that AI wasn't making the progress researchers had promised, and that the results were small compared to the money being spent. This led the British government to cut funding for AI projects, and as a result, the majority of labs struggled to keep their work going, which ultimately slowed down the research progress.

1979

The American Association for Artificial Intelligence was founded (AAAI), which became a key association for advancing AI research.

1980

AI experienced a period of growth known as the “AI boom” that pushed this field forward. Expert systems became widely used, including XCON, which was the first major commercial system. This period also includes events such as Japan’s massive investment in the Fifth Generation Computer Project (1981), as well as the development of early autonomous technologies. Although the AAAI warned that another “AI winter” was coming, innovation continued throughout the decade.

2000s

AI became increasingly visible in everyday life. In 2000, Professor Cynthia Breazeal introduced kismet, the first robot capable of displaying human-life facial expressions. Just two years later, Roomba was advancing, bringing simple AI into households. By 2006, companies like Twitter and Facebook,.

PRESENT

In recent years, AI has entered a new era of rapid growth and everyday use. This period has been defined by the rise of deep learning, big data, and easily accessible AI tools. Modern AI systems can recognize speech, can generate texts and images, translate languages, analyze raw data and much more. Many important breakthroughs helped push forward this artificial intelligence. In 2012, more than 3000 people, including Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Steve Wozniak signed a letter asking governments to ban autonomous weapons, which are military systems that can control targets without human intervention. A year later, Hanson robotics introduced Sophia, a robot able to show facial expressions and communicate. In 2018, Alibaba’s AI beat humans on a reading comprehension test. In 2020, OpenAI began testing GPT-3, an AI that can write text and code almost like a human. In 2021, OpenAI released DALL·E, an AI that can understand images and create new ones from a description. Today’s AI is rapidly improving, however, ensuring a safe online world remains a challenge.

FUTURE?

Looking ahead, the future of AI is full of possibilities. AI is expected to become even more helpful in everyday life. We’ll likely see more jobs changing as automation replaces some tasks and creates new ones. While we can't predict everything AI will become, it is clear that it will continue to grow and shape the world. AI has the potential to help the planet, but it also brings new challenges, training large AI models requires a lot of electricity, which will eventually increase carbon emissions if the energy comes from non-renewable sources. In the future, AI’s impact on the environment will depend on how responsibly we make use of these systems.