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| Origins
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| | The Greek myth of Pygmalion is the story of a statue brought to life for the love of her sculptor. The Greek god Hephaestus' robot Talos guarded Crete from attackers, running the circumference of the island 3 times a day. The Greek Oracle at Delphi was history's first chatbot and expert system.
| | | | In the 3rd century BC, Chinese engineer Mo Ti created mechanical birds, dragons, and warriors. Technology was being used to transform myth into reality.
| | | | | | | | | | Much later, the Royal courts of Enlightenment-age Europe were endlessly amused by mechanical ducks and humanoid figures, crafted by clockmakers. It has long been possible to make machines that looked and moved in human-like ways - machines that could spook and awe the audience - but creating a model of the mind was off limits.
| | | | | | | | | | | Artists have long considered AI issues
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However, writers and artists were not bound by the limits of science in exploring extra-human intelligence, and the Jewish myth of the Golem, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, all the way through to Forbidden Planet's Robbie the Robot and 2001's HAL9000, gave us new - and troubling - versions of the manufactured humanoid.
| | | | | | | | | | | From the unision of Philosophy and Engineering the first mechanical calculator is born
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Between these engineers and authors, the world's philosophers were seeking to encode the laws of human thought into complex, logical systems. In the 1600s, engineering and philosophy began a slow merger which continues today. The mathematician, Blaise Pascal, created a mechanical calculator in 1642 (to enable gambling predictions). Another mathematician, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, improved Pascal's machine and made his own contribution to the philosophy of reasoning by proposing a calculus of thought.
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