If you're worried that artificial intelligence will transform your job, insinuate itself into your daily routines, or lead to wars fought with lethal autonomous systems, you're a little late--all of those things have already come to pass. The AI revolution is here. Recent developments like AI chatbots are important, but serve mostly to highlight that AI has been profoundly affecting our lives for decades--and will continue to for many more.

Anyone who appreciates video games realizes the incredible amount of artistry that goes into composing the music for such games--even the 8-bit sound effects of the earliest consoles in the '80s and '90s. These musical elements helped lay the foundation for the more dramatic, sweeping soundtracks that we associate with popular video games today. What you might not know is that many of the earliest video game composers were women, despite the male dominance of the industry as a whole. Often hired straight out of college, these artists were set to work laying down tracks for hits like Castlevania, Mega Man, and Bionic Commando. Yet, they rarely if ever received credit.

As a teenager in Maryland in the 1950s, Mary Allen Wilkes had no plans to become a software pioneer -- she dreamed of being a litigator. One day in junior high in 1950, though, her geography teacher surprised her with a comment: "Mary Allen, when you grow up, you should be a computer programmer!" Wilkes had no idea what a programmer was; she wasn't even sure what a computer was. The first digital computers had been built barely a decade earlier at universities and in government labs. By the time she was graduating from Wellesley College in 1959, she knew her legal ambitions were out of reach. Her mentors all told her the same thing: Don't even bother applying to law school. "They said: 'Don't do it.

How smart is the model without great data? Artificial intelligence has come a long way since the first developments in the field. Today, software can perform tasks that were unthinkable just a few decades ago. But the quality of AI still depends on human input that helps the systems learn. The algorithms can only function properly if there is some sort of human interaction.

New technology sometimes makes the world around us look unrecognizable. But human nature--even over the centuries--remains remarkably familiar. Again and again, as we've researched the stories that go into these podcast episodes, we've seen that the past is full of hints about what's coming around the corner. We hope you'll join us as we reveal The Secret History of the Future.

Listen to Secret History of the Future via Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play. It's 1783, and Paris is gripped by the prospect of a chess match. One of the contestants is François-André Philidor, who is considered the greatest chess player in Paris, and possibly the world. Everyone is so excited because Philidor is about to go head-to-head with the other biggest sensation in the chess world at the time. This story may sound a lot like Garry Kasparov taking on Deep Blue, IBM's chess-playing supercomputer. But that was only a couple of decades ago, and this chess match in Paris happened more than 200 years ago.