State of AI: How did we get here, and where are we going next?

At that point, technological revolution was still in its deployment phase. In 1908 Henry Ford had introduced the idea of Fordism and the production line. It was a brand new concept. Sales of the Ford car accelerated pretty quickly, pretty exponentially for the time. There's the readjustment phase: Wall Street crashed in 1929, followed by the depression and then World War II.