Ancient Myth

  • Greek Talos, Hephaestus’s metal servants; Jewish golem.
  • Early automata: Ctesibius (3rd c. BCE) and Heron (1st c. CE) built self-moving devices.
  • Medieval/Islamic engineers: BanΕ« MΕ«sā (9th c.) and al-JazarΔ« (1206) described programmable water/clockwork automata.
  • Renaissance–18th c.: Vaucanson’s flute-player and β€œDigesting Duck” (1730s); β€œThe Turk” chess automaton (1770, a hoax but influential).
  • Literature: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) on artificial life.
  • Modern term: β€œRobot” coined by Karel Čapek in the play R.U.R. (1920), from Czech robota (β€œforced labor”).
  • Film: Metropolis (1927) featured a humanoid robot.

Modern Concepts

1970s–1980s

  • Expert systems: MYCIN, XCON.
  • Industrial robots and PLC control.

1990s

  • OCR and handwriting for checks and mail; postal sorting.
  • Chess AIs: Deep Blue.
  • Web search ranking and anti-spam: PageRank, Naive Bayes filters.

2000s

  • Recommenders: Amazon, Netflix, YouTube.
  • Credit scoring and fraud detection.
  • Speech recognition: Dragon; voice IVR.
  • Early machine translation: Google Translate.
  • GPS routing: Google Maps, Waze.

2010s

  • Deep-learning vision: face unlock, photo tagging.
  • Virtual assistants: Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa.
  • Social feeds and ad targeting at scale.
  • AlphaGo.
  • Neural MT and real-time captioning.
  • Keyboard and email autocomplete.

2020s

  • LLM chatbots: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini.
  • Code assistants: GitHub Copilot.
  • Image generators: Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, DALLΒ·E.
  • Conversational search and summarization.
  • Driver assist and autonomy pilots: Tesla, Waymo.