The Ghost of AI Past, Present, and Future

Where we are, how we got there, and where we might be going

This is a fun end-of-year piece inspired by “A Christmas Carol” where I explore where AI has been, where it is now, and what I believe is up ahead.

This piece is part of Festive Tech Calendar 2024, hence the callbacks to A Christmas Carol.

The Ghost of AI Past

I’m around the point where I’m considered older for a developer, and yet artificial intelligence predates me by decades, going back to the 1950s.

Over time, we’ve seen a number of cycles where people assume that the world’s logic can be codified into computer programs to produce automated decision-making that rivals the intelligence of a trained human expert. This has come about through things like decision trees, expert systems, and even neural networks.

On its surface, the reasoning is clear: if you can boil down the processes of a human expert into a series of key decisions, computers should be able to flawlessly execute those decisions. Or, at a more biological level, if you can take the structure of a brain and emulate it with a neural network, it should be able to emulate the learning process exhibited by organic life.