Module 2: History of AI, and Machine Learning
Mandatory Watching - videos with quizzes - finish by 11 am, Thursday, June 25
- 2.1 — Lecture: History of AI, 22 minutes (Uploaded March 27, 2026)
- 2.2 — Lecture: Symbolic and Neural Approaches to AI, 48 minutes (Uploaded July 31, 2025)
- 2.3 — Crash Course AI: Symbolic AI, 13 minutes (Uploaded Oct. 18, 2019)
- 2.4 — IBM Technologies: What is Machine Learning, 8 minutes (Uploaded July 14, 2021)
- 2.5 — CGP Grey - How AI Learns, 8 minutes (Uploaded Dec. 18, 2017)
- 2.6 — Marta Garnelo - Symbolic Methods and Deep Learning, CogX 2018, 11 minutes (Uploaded June 12, 2018) - no questions, but must watch at least 80% of video for credit
Written assignment - finish by end of Thursday, June 25, review three others by meeting on Tuesday, June 30.
- Read/watch your Assigned Fiction
2. Describe the “AI” in your assigned fiction
You must read or watch your assigned fiction (see spreadsheet (link removed) to see which you were assigned to) and answer some questions about it. Do not use AI for any part of this assignment.
Further reading/watching
- Timelines of the history of AI:
- Interactive version of the timeline of models that Claude made for my slides
- AI Timeline, poster by Danielle Williams
- Another timeline, by Michelle Hawley
- Wikipedia’s timeline, which includes much “pre-history” of AI, and much fiction about it
- New York Times, article about the history of AI from 2012 to 2023 (Dec. 9, 2023)
- Dwarkesh Patel’s video (and written blog post) about continual learning (June/August 2025)
- Shaw Talebi - Multi-agent systems explained in 17 minutes (Feb. 22, 2026)
- Historic artifacts:
- Documentaries about pre-computer automata:
- The Jaquet-Droz automata, 18 minutes (Dec. 5, 2011), some amazing 18th century clockwork automata
- York Automata Museum, documentary on historical automata, 29 minutes (~1990)
- You can interact with ELIZA here
- Here is the very first website
- Documentaries about pre-computer automata: