We are currently in the throes of an AI renaissance – but it hasn’t always been that way. AI hasn’t advanced in a single, upward exponential curve that those tech companies currently at the forefront of the generative AI revolution love to suggest. Instead, it’s a stuttering story of two steps forward, one step back.
To understand why, we have to go back to the Cold War.
For the United States, artificial intelligence held huge promise because of its ability to help the country maintain a scientific and military edge over its big ideological and geopolitical rival, the Soviet Union. The US government saw the potential of AI to provide near-simultaneous translation of diplomatic and spying messages sent in Russian that they were tapping. Similarly, the US government, in a race for scientific supremacy, would also want to know what Soviet scientists were publishing in academic papers. Speedier translations of technical reports would help them achieve that. In short, AI could aid the US in peeking behind the inscrutable Iron Curtain.
Machine translation, then (remember AI as a term would not be developed until the Dartmouth summer conference of 1956), was put at the forefront of development. And Georgetown University and tech titan IBM were in…
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