5 pillars of AI innovation over the past 40 years

Artificial intelligence came alive in the 80s with many startups, governments, and large enterprises deploying new systems that executed tasks typically performed by human experts. These were largely rule-based systems that encoded behaviors in rules versus the strict procedural logic of traditional programming languages. Then, as memory became more affordable, systems were able to handle much more computationally-intense tasks such as machine learning, planning and scheduling, and natural language understanding. Now in the age of Big Data, many believe AI has completely changed the tech landscape, but in some ways, as the Talking Heads song goes, it's the "same as it ever was". What remains the same are the core elements of an intelligent application.