What the history of AI tells us about its future

That isn't what happened, of course. Indeed, when we look back now, 25 years later, we can see that Deep Blue's victory wasn't so much a triumph of AI but a kind of death knell. It was a high-water mark for old-school computer intelligence, the laborious handcrafting of endless lines of code, which would soon be eclipsed by a rival form of AI: the neural net--in particular, the technique known as "deep learning." For all the weight it threw around, Deep Blue was the lumbering dinosaur about to be killed by an asteroid; neural nets were the little mammals that would survive and transform the planet. Yet even today, deep into a world chock-full of everyday AI, computer scientists are still arguing whether machines will ever truly "think."