What the history of AI tells us about its future

Then Kasparov lurched out of his chair to walk toward the audience. At its finest moment, he later said, the machine "played like a god." For anyone interested in artificial intelligence, the grand master's defeat rang like a bell. Newsweek called the match "The Brain's Last Stand"; another headline dubbed Kasparov "the defender of humanity." If AI could beat the world's sharpest chess mind, it seemed that computers would soon trounce humans at everything--with IBM leading the way.