Artificial intelligence is the transformative, strategic technology of the early 21st century. It is significantly reshaping practically every aspect of our lives, including in ways that probably no one anticipated. Its rate of adoption and impact have been unprecedented when compared with other technologies.
AI as a distinct field was formally established in 1956 at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, proposed by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon. In their August 1955 proposal for the research project, the scientists introduced the term artificial intelligence and envisioned machines capable of simulating human intelligence.
AI is the “science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men,” as defined by Minsky. The professor received the ACM Turing Award, which is often called the “Nobel Prize in computing.”
Since AI’s humble beginnings 70 years ago, it has evolved significantly in its capabilities, gained prominence, and earned widespread adoption across many areas including business, education, finance, health care, industry, and the military.
IEEE’s contributions to the progress and adoption of AI throughout its journey are substantial and multifaceted.
As we celebrate AI’s 70th birthday, understanding its history, current status, limitations, and concerns is key to harnessing it for good.
The technology’s roller-coaster evolution
Although AI emerged as a distinct field in 1956, its intellectual roots extend back further. The ideas and theories that underpin AI predate modern computers such as the ENIAC, unveiled in 1946.
In 1943 Warren Sturgis McCulloch, a neurophysiologist and cybernetician, and Walter Pitts, a logician working in computational neuroscience, were inspired by the human brain. The two devised mathematical models of artificial neurons, demonstrating that artificial neural networks could perform logical computation.
Frank Rosenblatt, a Cornell psychologist, later advanced those ideas by developing the perceptron, an early neural network that laid the foundation for modern machine learning and deep learning.
A major milestone came in 1950, when celebrated computer scientist Alan Turing posed the question, “Can machines think?” In his 1950 landmark paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” published in Mind, he explored the nature of machine intelligence. He introduced the “imitation game,” later known as the Turing test, as a practical means of evaluating it. The test remains an influential concept in AI and the philosophy of intelligence, as I discussed in my article “The Turing Test at 75: Its Legacy and Future Prospects,” published in IEEE Intelligent Systems.
Claude Shannon, recognized as the father of information theory, explored the potential of machines for complex reasoning tasks in his 1950 article “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess,” published in Philosophical Magazine.
In 1956 AI became a formal discipline, inspiring scientists to explore and advance it further. John McCarthy developed Lisp in 1958, and it became the dominant programming language for AI research and development. In 1959 Arthur Lee Samuel, a computer science professor at Stanford, introduced the term machine learning to describe programs that could improve their performance through experience.
In the early 1980s, renewed enthusiasm and government funding fueled the development of symbolic AI, a rule-based expert system (also known as a knowledge-based system) that encodes domain-specific knowledge as sets of rules. A notable example was MYCIN, designed to diagnose infectious diseases.
Although successful in limited domains, expert systems’ inherent limitations have restricted their broader adoption. Expert refers to a computer system that mimics human experts in a specific domain. It was popular in the early days of AI, and subsequently disappeared with advances in AI such as neural networks and machine learning.
AI’s journey was marked by periods of soaring expectations and disappointing progress, known as “AI winters,” during which funding, interest, and confidence declined. Analyses of the episodes revealed recurring causes and insightful lessons for the field.
A new phase of growth—often described as “AI spring”—emerged in the 2010s with advances in deep learning, the rise of large language models, the transformer architecture, and generative AI (GenAI).
“The imperative before us today is not only to advance AI’s capabilities but also to ensure that it remains human-centered, trustworthy, ethical, and dedicated to enhancing human well-being and societal progress.”
Unlike earlier approaches that processed information sequentially, a transformer model analyzes an entire sequence of text or audio, assessing the importance of each word or component relative to others, enabling dramatic advancements in GenAI and its applications.
Ashish Vaswani, a former computer scientist at Google, and his colleagues at Google Brain introduced the transformer architecture that underpins today’s generative AI systems in their influential 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need.” Vaswani and Sam Altman—chief executive of OpenAI, which offers ChatGPT—are widely regarded as the masterminds behind the GenAI revolution.
AI reached new heights with the public release of ChatGPT in 2022, followed quickly by a wave of chatbots and generative AI tools that accelerated global interest.
More recently, the rise of agentic AI systems capable of increasingly autonomous operation has expanded AI’s capabilities and impact.
AI’s 70-year journey reflects an extraordinary interplay of vision, experimentation, setbacks, innovation, and impact.
For further information and diverse perspectives on AI history, check out my curated collection of articles.
Strengths and promises
AI’s pragmatic strength lies in its ability to process information, recognize patterns, and perform cognitive tasks at an unprecedented speed and scale. It can analyze vast amounts of data, extract insights, and identify trends or anomalies that are difficult for humans to detect. The programs can automate routine tasks and repetitive knowledge work, improve productivity, and reduce costs.
Chatbots and other forms of GenAI can answer queries and rapidly create text, images, videos, music, software code, educational materials, and other content on the fly in response to a user’s prompts, accelerating information-gathering, innovation, and decision-making. AI summarizes, translates, and rephrases text effectively and can assist in idea generation. It also facilitates natural-language interactions, making technology more accessible to nonexperts and the diverse global community. Its multimodal capabilities enhance its usefulness across diverse domains. Additionally, it can serve as a powerful collaborator, augmenting creativity and problem-solving capacity rather than replacing human intelligence.
AI is transitioning from standalone tools to autonomous, goal-driven systems. Agentic AI systems that can plan, act, and adapt with minimal human oversight are on the rise, enabling large-scale impact.
The 400-page AI Index 2026, published by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, reveals the technology’s enhanced capabilities and unprecedented adoption rates, outpacing those of the telephone, the television, the personal computer, and the Internet.
For a deep exposition on the current state of AI, read this analysis from IEEE Spectrum, which also published the “Great AI Reckoning” special report.
Weaknesses and concerns
Along with its benefits, AI presents significant risks and concerns. They include biased, discriminatory, and harmful responses; a lack of transparency and explainability in decision-making; privacy violations from data collected for AI training; and cybersecurity vulnerabilities including AI-powered attacks.
AI systems can hallucinate, generating confident but incorrect or fabricated information. Moreover, AI can facilitate and amplify the spread of misinformation, deepfakes, and manipulated content, undermining public trust and driving the algorithmic manipulation of public opinion. The flattering, people-pleasing, or affirming behavior known as AI sycophancy can be harmful as well.
Overreliance on AI could erode human judgment, critical thinking, and decision-making skills. And autonomous systems can make errors with serious consequences in critical domains including defense, health care, and transportation.
The technology’s development and deployment, therefore, must be guided by informed understanding, sound judgment, and responsible governance. In assessing AI’s suitability for any application, its capabilities, advantages, limitations, and risks must be carefully and holistically considered.
IEEE’s contributions
IEEE has not merely documented and disseminated AI’s progress. It has actively fostered, standardized, and guided it toward further advances and responsible use for the benefit of humanity. IEEE maintains a hub for information on its AI activities that is a valuable resource for researchers, developers, regulators, and users.
IEEE publishes 11 AI-focused journals that advance the frontiers of knowledge, including IEEE Intelligent Systems. In its AI at 70 commemorative issue, Intelligent Systems identified the 10 most influential AI articles published since 2000. The magazine, produced by the IEEE Computer Society, has inducted 10 pioneers into its AI Hall of Fame, honoring their contributions and impact on technology and society.
To foster AI research and development, since 2006, the magazine has recognized the field’s rising stars through its AI’s 10 to Watch awards. The biennial awards spotlight outstanding contributions of young researchers and professionals. Nominations for this year’s awards are open until 1 July.
Since the early days of AI, the IEEE Computer, Computational Intelligence, and Systems, Man, and Cybernetics societies have been among those that have fostered AI research and practice. The Computer Society offers a guide to becoming an AI developer.
IEEE and its societies sponsor more than 100 AI conferences annually. The conference archives are available in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.
The IEEE Learning Network offers more than 200 courses across AI-related areas.
The IEEE Standards Association has developed more than 100 AI-related standards. Its CertifAIEd program promotes ethical design and deployment of autonomous intelligent systems.
The Institute has featured several IEEE members who have developed AI-driven applications, such as Abhishek Appaji, who has created tools to help detect psychiatric disorders.
Shaping AI’s future
The history of AI helps us understand the motivations behind developments and inspires and guides us toward the next phase of the technology’s innovation and revolution. AI’s trajectory is bound to be shaped by the collective choices we make now and in the future.
As Turing wrote in his 1950 landmark article, “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”
The imperative before us today is not only to advance AI’s capabilities but also to ensure that it remains human-centered, trustworthy, ethical, and dedicated to enhancing human well-being and societal progress.
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