The history of AI is the history of an overhyped intellectual brand that has only very recently come to signify a set of deployable technologies with broad application and clear, if somewhat horrifying, purposes. Since its debut in 1955 the AI brand has been attached to a rotating cast of technologies with only loose connections to each other or to cognition, none of which has yet come close to delivering on the promise of creating computer systems with human-like intelligence. One AI insider characterized the story of AI as “the history of failed ideas.” Yet in the process of failing, early AI researchers made vital but incidental contributions to the development of computer technology and computer science. In this talk, Thomas Haigh explored where the AI brand came from, why it was so attractive to researchers and sponsors, and how artificial intelligence institutionalized as a subfield of computer science through research labs, curricula, textbooks, and professional associations. Haigh also documented continuities and discontinuities between our own moment and earlier cycles of AI hype and disillusionment.
Thomas Haigh is a professor and chair of the history department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. After studying computer science at Manchester University, he won a Fulbright award for a Ph.D. in the history and sociology of science from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the lead author of A New History of Modern Computing (2021) and ENIAC in Action (2016), both published by MIT Press. At UWM he runs a retrocomputing lab with working systems from the 1980s and 1990s. His current book project is Artificial Intelligence: A Short History of a Big Brand. More at www.tomandmaria.com/tom.
Ludger Hagedorn, IWM Permanent Fellow, moderated the discussion.
