The Birth of AI and The First AI Hype Cycle

Every decade seems to have its technological buzzwords: we had personal computers in 1980s; Internet and worldwide web in 1990s; smart phones and social media in 2000s; and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning in this decade. While artificial intelligence (AI) is among today's most popular topics, a commonly forgotten fact is that it was actually born in 1950 and went through a hype cycle between 1956 and 1982. The purpose of this article is to highlight some of the achievements that took place during the boom phase of this cycle and explain what led to its bust phase. The lessons to be learned from this hype cycle should not be overlooked – its successes formed the archetypes for machine learning algorithms used today, and its shortcomings indicated the dangers of overenthusiasm in promising fields of research and development. Although the first computers were developed during World War II [1,2], what seemed to truly spark the field of AI was a question proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 [3]: can a machine imitate human intelligence?