The Curious Case of AI Technology

The notion of Artificial Intelligence has been around for a while. Yet, unlike other prominent technological innovations such as electric cars or the processor speed, its progress has not been linear. In fact, as far as industrial impact is concerned, there were times when allegedly there was no progress at all. The widespread fascination with AI started several generations ago, in 80-s of the last century. This is when a pioneering work of Noam Chomsky on computational grammar led to a belief that human language capabilities in particular, and human intelligence in general, can be straightforwardly algorithmized.