CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS -

Artificial intelligence (AI) has a longer history than most people realize, and as the world enters a new digital age and looks ahead to the myriad ways in which AI and other tech will continue shaping people’s lives, it helps to look back at how far humanity has already come and to see what relevant lessons history might hold.

This special five-part series written by Gil Press, AI commentator and contributor for The Yuan, begins with a look back at AI’s origins in the 1940s, when forward-thinking psychologists and scientists were already thinking about how machines might develop and evolve, and what non-human forms of intelligence might look like if machines could ever be made to think. The second installment of the series moves on to the 1950s, when AI was formally defined and one of the earliest neural networks - known as ‘The Perceptron’ -