(An homage to one of my favorite pieces on the internet: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages)
Early History: Various automata were built powered by water, clockwork or steam. Redditors at the time argue that they are not really robots. This is despite the fact that the word “robot” would not be invented until 1920.
1495: Leonardo da Vinci invents a mechanical knight that sits up, moves its head and waves its arm. Despite a lack of working prototype he immediately gets over 500M in seed funding, a feat that would not be replicated until the launch of Figure AI, five centuries later.
1770: Wolfgang von Kempelen builds the Mechanical Turk, a chess playing automaton with a human hidden inside controlling it. The twin values of casual racism and investor fraud would later be codified into the “AI startup common practice” of using overseas call centers to fake artificial intelligence until the founders run out of money.
1920: Karel Čapek coins the word ‘robot’ in a play about mechanical laborers who turn on their human masters. Everyone is very excited and decides they want one right away.
1939: At the World’s Fair, Westinghouse Electric presents a replacement for the modern man: Elektro, a humanoid robot capable of talking, responding to voice commands and smoking cigarettes. After 32 consecutive hours of sitting on its favorite armchair and demanding a brandy, Westinghouse Electric decides that perhaps they should have made a replacement for the modern woman instead, but that project is shuttered before it can really begin due to the outbreak of World War II.
Elektro
1943: Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts invent artificial neural networks. Everyone ignores them for several decades.
1961: George Devol creates Unimate, the first industrial robot, and puts it to work at the General Motors assembly line. Redditors at the time argue that this, also, is not really a robot because it doesn’t have legs or LLM integration.
1968: Single layer neural networks (called perceptrons in the quaint vernacular of the time) are hailed as the Next Big Thing. AI is declared solved. Scientists prepare for the coming technological utopia.
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