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Artificial Intelligence: An Illustrated History: From Medieval Robots to Neural Networks

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In this book, we encounter subjects that range from medieval robots, legends of ancient golems, and Victorian-era steampunk machines to advanced computing approaches involving artificial neural networks that learn and improve their performance. In this book, a topic can turn from technical to humorous to emotional to transcendent with just the turn of a page.

We’ll also address the ethical use of AI and even the challenges of placing advanced AI entities in a “leakproof” box to isolate them from the real-world, should the AIs become dangerously super-intelligent. We'll need to be particularly cautious when developing autonomous weapons systems and overly relying on AI technologies with inscrutable mechanisms.

Artificial Intelligence
An Illustrated History

From Medieval Robots to Neural Networks

Clifford A. Pickover

Praise for Pickover

"Pickover contemplates realms beyond our known reality."
-- The New York Times

"Pickover inspires a new generation of da Vincis to build unknown flying machines and create new Mona Lisas."
-- Christian Science Monitor


Throughout history, the mystery of the mind and the possibility of artificial beings have captivated artists, scientists, philosophers, and even theologians. Stories involving automata—moving mechanical devices made in imitation of livings beings—permeate our myths, paintings, and literature. Similarly, our interest in artificial intelligence (AI)—apparently intelligent behavior by machines—is also reflected in our entertainment, presenting transcendent themes involving emotional robots and advanced intelligences that we can barely comprehend.

Book milestones include:

125 BCE: Antikythera Mechanism • 1206: Al-Jazari’s Automata • c. 1220: Lancelot’s Copper Knights • c. 1300: Hesdin Mechnical Park • c. 1305: Ramon Llull’s Ars Magna• 1352: Church Automata • c. 1495: da Vinci’s Robot Knight • 1714: The Consciousness Mill • 1738: de Vaucanson’s Duck Automaton• 1821: Computational Creativity • 1868: The Steam Man of the Prairies • 1893: Electric Bob’s Big Black Ostrich • 1898: Tesla’s “Borrowed Mind” • 1907: Searches for the Soul • 1927: Metropolis • 1942: Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics • 1942: Lethal Military Robots • 1943: Artificial Neural Networks • 1957: Perceptrons • 1957: Transhumanism • 1959: Machine Learning • 1965: Intelligence Explosion • 1965: Deep Learning • 1967: Living in a Simulation • 1968: Cybernetic Serendipity • 1976: Ethics of AI • 1986: Artificial Life • 1986: Swarm Intelligence • 2003: Paperclip Maximizer Catastrophe • 2015: Computer Art and DeepDream • 2019: AI Death Predictor • And many more....

Today, the applications of AI seem limitless…. AI has been used for predicting earthquakes, interpreting medical images and speech, and for predicting a person’s time of death. AI has been deployed for generating jokes, mathematical theorems, U.S. patents, new games, novel chess puzzles, innovative designs for antennas, new paint colors and fragrances, and more.

AI discoveries in the future will be among humanity’s greatest achievements. If AI methods are already being used to help determine who gets hired for a job, who we date, who makes parole, who is likely to develop a psychiatric disorder, and how to autonomously drive cars and drones, then how much control over our lives will we give to AIs of the future? For the author, AI cultivates a perpetual state of wonder about the limits of thought, the future of humanity, and our place in the vast space-time landscape that we call home.

Sampling of Images from Artificial Intelligence: An Illustrated History

Searches for the Soul
Searches for the Soul
Computational Creativity
Computational Creativity
Language Processing
Language Processing
Golem
Golem
AlphaGo Go Champion
AlphaGo Go Champion
Tik-Tok
Tik-Tok
Swarm Intelligence
Swarm Intelligence
Intelligence Explosion
Intelligence Explosion
rtificial Aliens
Artificial Aliens
3-D Tic-Tac-Toe
3-D Tic-Tac-Toe
Artificial Life
Babbage's Computer
Metropolis
Asimov's Laws

"Bucky Fuller thought big, Arthur C. Clarke thinks big, but Cliff Pickover outdoes them both." -- WIRED

"A perpetual idea machine, Clifford Pickover is one of the most creative, original thinkers in the world today." -- Journal of Recreational Mathematics

Clifford A. Pickover has published more than 50 books, translated into a dozen languages, on topics ranging from science and mathematics to religion, art, and history. He received his PhD degree from Yale University, has been granted more than 800 US patents, and has more than 180,000 X (formerly Twitter) followers. For many years, he was an IBM researcher and inventor and editor-in-chief of the IBM Journal of Research and Development. He is the author of many other books including Death and the Afterlife, The Physics Book, and The Math Book, which won the Neumann Prize.

Pickover has been elected a Fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry for his "significant contributions to the general public's understanding of science, reason, and critical inquiry through scholarship, writing, and work in the media." Other Fellows have included Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov.

Follow Dr. Cliff Pickover on 𝕏/Twitter. | Return to Pickover's main web page. | Info on Pickover's other books.


Artificial Intelligence: An Illustrated History
Some Topics

c. 1300 BCE: Tic-Tac-Toe
c. 400 BCE: Talos
c. 350 BCE: Aristotle’s Organon
c. 250 BCE: Ktesibios’s Water Clock
c. 190 BCE: Abacus
c. 125 BCE: Antikythera Mechanism
1206: Al-Jazari’s Automata
c. 1220: Lancelot’s Copper Knights
c. 1300: Hesdin Mechnical Park
c. 1305: Ramon Llull’s Ars Magna
1352: Church Automata
c. 1495: da Vinci’s Robot Knight
1580: Golem
1651: Hobbes’s Leviathan
1714: The Consciousness Mill
1726: Lagado Book-Writing Engine
1738: de Vaucanson’s Duck Automaton
1770: Mechanical Turk
1774: Jaquet-Droz Automata
1818: Frankenstein
1821: Computational Creativity
1822: Babbage’s Mechanical Computer
1844: “The Artist of the Beautiful”
1854: Boolean Algebra
1863: “Darwin among the Machines”
1868: The Steam Man of the Prairies
1883: Tower of Hanoi
1893: Electric Bob’s Big Black Ostrich
1898: Tesla’s “Borrowed Mind”
1907: Tik-Tok
1907: Searches for the Soul
1913: Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
1920: Rossum’s Universal Robots
1927: Metropolis
1939: Elektro the Moto-Man
1939: Speech Synthesis
1942: Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics
1942: Lethal Military Robots
1943: Artificial Neural Networks
1946: ENIAC
1949: Giant Brains, or Machines That Think
1950: Turing Test
1950: The Human Use of Human Beings
1951: Reinforcement Learning
1952: Speech Recognition
1954: Natural Language Processing
1956: Dartmouth AI Workshop
1957: Perceptrons
1957: Transhumanism
1959: Machine Learning
1959: Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
1960: Licklider’s “Man-Computer Symbiosis”
1964: ELIZA Psychotherapist
1964: Face Recognition
1965: Intelligence Explosion
1965: Expert Systems
1965: Fuzzy Logic
1965: Deep Learning
1966: Shakey the Robot
1967: Living in a Simulation
1968: Cybernetic Serendipity
1968: HAL 9000
1970: Mastermind
1970: Colossus: The Forbin Project
1971: SHRDLU
1972: Paranoid PARRY
1975: Genetic Algorithms
1976: Ethics of AI
1979: Backgammon Champion Defeated
1980: Chinese Room
1982: Blade Runner
1984: Autonomous Vehicles
1984: The Terminator
1986: Artificial Life
1986: Swarm Intelligence
1988: Moravec’s Paradox
1988: Connect Four
1990: “Elephants Don’t Play Chess”
1993: Leakproof “AI Box”
1994: Checkers and AI
1996: Tamagotchi
1997: Deep Blue Defeats Chess Champion
1997: Othello
1999: AIBO Robot
2000: ASIMO and Friends
2001: Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence
2002: Solving the Game of Awari
2002: Roomba
2003: Paperclip Maximizer Catastrophe
2006: Quackle’s Scrabble Win
2011: Watson on Jeopardy!
2015: Computer Art and DeepDream
2015: “Call Them Artificial Aliens”
2015: AI on Mars
2016: AlphaGo Go Champion
2016: Autonomous Robotic Surgery
2017: AI Poker
2018: Adversarial Patches
2018: Rubik’s Cube Robots
2019: AI Death Predictor
2020: AlphaFold 2
2021: DALL-E
2022: ChatGPT
2023: Slowing the AI Race?
Notes and References
For the Joy of Learning
Other Illustrated Books by Pickover

"My primary interest is finding new ways to continually expand creativity
by melding art, science, mathematics and other seemingly disparate areas
of human endeavor. I seek not only to expand the mind, but to shatter it."



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