The Claude Before Claude
Who is the man whose name we utter every day the moment we open one of the most popular artificial intelligences? Why will no one confirm that the bot is named after him? And how did a seemingly unremarkable mathematician, who rode his one-wheeled bike through the corridors of MIT, arrive at the idea that gave birth to both the mobile phone and large language models?
02Dartmouth: Pouring the Foundations of AI
“By 1978 at the latest, we will have a machine with general artificial intelligence comparable to average human intelligence,” says Marvin Minsky, one of the scientists who organized the Dartmouth meeting. It gave birth to fundamental ideas and raised questions that seem more important today than ever… ChatGPT was unveiled in November 2022. But when was artificial intelligence… “born”? The idea that computers can resemble humans and solve a wide range of problems. How many candles will it have to blow out on its next birthday—5, 10, 20? A full 68! Although by 1956 the forerunners of the field, Alan Turing and John von Neumann, had long since made their fundamental discoveries, it is ’56 that is now considered the starting year in the history of the field. For 8 weeks, the greatest scientists in this future field came and went at an American college. The people who would later lay the foundations of the field gathered to talk about the main challenges they faced…
03“Programs, Programs and More Programs!”: The Computer Future as Seen from 1988
In the 1988 book Klyuchat kam badeshteto (The Key to the Future), Ivan Ivanov and Metodi Stamenov gathered the era's visions of the computer world. Looking at today from that vantage point is more than impressive: what did the authors get right, what have we achieved, where have we failed, and are there moments when, 34 years later, we sound just as optimistically ignorant about what technology can do? And who came up with the title's idea, so fashionable today in career choices?
