### 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: Banū Mūsā (9th c.) and al-Jazarī (1206) described programmable water/clockwork automata.
- Renaissance–18th c.: Vaucanson’s flute-player and “Digesting Duck” (1730s); “The Turk” chess automaton (1770, a hoax but influential).
- Literature: Mary Shelley’s _Frankenstein_ (1818) on artificial life.
- Modern term: “Robot” coined by Karel Čapek in the play _R.U.R._ (1920), from Czech _robota_ (“forced 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, DALL·E.
- Conversational search and summarization.
- Driver assist and autonomy pilots: Tesla, Waymo.