Untold History of AI: The DARPA Dreamer Who Aimed for Cyborg Intelligence

The history of AI is often told as the story of machines getting smarter over time. What's lost is the human element in the narrative, how intelligent machines are designed, trained, and powered by human minds and bodies. In this six-part series, we explore that human history of AI--how innovators, thinkers, workers, and sometimes hucksters have created algorithms that can replicate human thought and behavior (or at least appear to). While it can be exciting to be swept up by the idea of super-intelligent computers that have no need for human input, the true history of smart machines shows that our AI is only as good as we are. At 10:30pm on 29 October 1969, a graduate student at UCLA sent a two-letter message from an SDS Sigma 7 computer to another machine a few hundred miles away at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park. The student had meant to send "LOGIN," but the packet switching network supporting the transmission of the message, the ARPANET, crashed before the whole message could be typed out.