The invisible workers of the AI era

In the early days of research on Artificial Intelligence, Frank Rosenblatt, a scientist at Cornell University in the United States, invented what he called the "perceptron". The perceptron was an algorithm designed to classify objects it was shown and an ancestor of modern Artificial Intelligence. When Rosenblatt became a little boastful at a press conference in 1958, the New York Times picked up on it and went a little overboard with excitement. "NEW NAVY DEVICE LEARNS BY DOING; Psychologist Shows Embryo of Computer Designed to Read and Grow Wiser", read the title of an article. The Navy said the perceptron would be the first non-living mechanism "capable of receiving, recognizing and identifying its surroundings without any human training or control" Does this tone sound familiar?