Like Pygmalion breathing life into his marble statue or Rabbi Loew shaping the Golem from clay to protect his people, humanity has long dreamed of imbuing machines or artificial creations with consciousness, intelligence, and perhaps even the glimpse of a "soul." This fundamental human ambition has manifested itself across centuries in various forms, from Hero of Alexandria's ingenious automata to the mechanical marvels of the Enlightenment era, like Vaucanson's digesting duck. Even the infamous Mechanical Turk, ultimately revealed as an elaborate hoax, captured the zeitgeist of an era when the possibility of a machine with human-like intelligence and sentience seemed like another attainable achievement of the human unbridled intellect.
Things with intelligence “onboard”, from the ancient Automata to ChatGPT
From old myths to contemporary popular culture, the quest to create intelligent, thinking machines is perhaps the deepest human aspiration.
After an invitation by Queen Christina, he secretly transported the robot to Sweden in 1649. When sailors discovered the automaton in its casket, and it sat up to greet them, they hurled it into the sea in terror
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- Andrea Nepori
- 07 November 2024
Literature and cinema have persistently explored this theme, often delivering stories that doubled as awe-inspiring drama and cautionary tales about our innate hubris. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), inspired by the myth of Prometheus stealing fire, can also be seen as a warning about the risks of creating artificial life. One century later, the theme was explored again in Karel Čapek's Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti or R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), the play that gave us the word "robot."
When Stanley Kubrick introduced HAL 9000 in "2001: A Space Odyssey," in the late sixties, the theme incorporated the symbolism of the space age, yet the fundamental archetypes he touched upon didn't change. Kubrick created the most memorable portrayal of artificial intelligence gone rogue, one we constantly refer to this day, capturing both the promise and peril of creating machines that think and feel thoughts and feelings of their own.
The real-life technological journey, however, has been more nuanced than fiction suggested. ELIZA's simple yet convincing conversation capabilities were a sensation when the chatbot was released in the sixties, and so was Stanford's Shakey, a moving robot capable of "reasoning" about its actions and decisions. Despite all of the best scientific efforts, the promise of artificial intelligence research wasn't delivered quickly enough.
These unmet expectations (and a flurry of overinflated promises) led to what is commonly known as AI Winter, three decades that lasted until the end of the century during which funding, interest, and research in artificial intelligence dramatically decreased.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, inspired by the myth of Prometheus stealing fire, can also be seen as a warning about the risks of creating artificial life.
Even Deep Blue's chess mastery breakthrough in the late nineties was an isolated success, based more on brute force computation and chess heuristics, rather than actual AI. The first sign of a concrete AI Winter thawing only came with the confluence of internet-based big data collection, improved computing power, and breakthroughs in machine learning and neural networks during the early 2010s. This new approach to AI, which focuses on learning from vast amounts of data rather than following pre-programmed rules, would prove revolutionary, rekindling our millennia-long obsession with inflating conscience and intelligence in machines.
When DeepMind's AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol in a historic match of Go in 2016 thanks to the power of its deep learning algorithm, the Korean champion described his experience as playing against "someone from a completely different planet." This was a crucial insight: machine intelligence might not mirror human cognition but rather complement it or surpass it in fundamentally unexpected ways.
Today, as language models and A.I. systems become increasingly sophisticated, we find ourselves at a fascinating juncture where science seems to finally be able to catch up with centuries of imagination and science fiction.
In our gallery, we compiled a chronological collection to trace our innate obsession with non-human and machine intelligence through key moments, inventions, and breakthroughs. Each entry represents a step in humanity's persistent quest to create intelligence outside of biological evolution, whether scientific or purely fictional. While absolutely not exhaustive, our timeline tries to capture the essential narrative of how we've pursued artificial and machine intelligence across the centuries.
Ancient Greece's mathematician and inventor, Hero of Alexandria, designed numerous self-operating machines, including temple doors that opened automatically, mechanical singing birds, and his famous wind-powered pipe organ. His treatise "On Automaton-Making" became history's earliest "robotics" manual.
French Philosopher Descartes was reportedly fond of automata. According to an apocryphal tale, after his five-year-old daughter Francine died, he had a talking and walking automata built in her semblance.
After an invitation by Queen Christina, he secretly transported the robot to Sweden in 1649. When sailors discovered the automaton in its casket, and it sat up to greet them, they hurled it into the sea in terror
In 1738, inventor and artist Jaques de Vaucanson built a copper automaton duck that appeared to eat, digest, and defecate, perfectly encapsulating the period's fascination with mechanical simulation of biological processes.
One of the most famous automata of all time, the Mechanical Turk, was a chess-playing machine that toured Europe, defeating Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin. It was later exposed as an elaborate hoax: a chess-proficient human player was concealed inside.
In 1920, Karel Čapek's play Rossum's Universal Robot introduced the word "robot" to the world, depicting artificial workers who rebel against their human masters.
In 1968, Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" introduced the fictional sentient computer HAL 9000. The film captured the time's public fears about intelligent machines taking over humanity in a not-too-far future, and its beaming red "eye" became a timeless symbol for a rebel sentient machine.
Joseph Weizenbaum's Eliza ( is widely renowned as the first-ever chatbot. The software simulated a dialogue with a human counterpart, demonstrating how simple pattern matching could create the illusion of understanding and sentience.
From 1966 through 1972, the Stanford Research Institute developed Shakey, the first mobile robot capable of "reasoning" about its actions. It combined computer vision, navigation, and basic problem-solving abilities.
KITT, l'auto intelligente del telefilm “Knight Rider”, ha reso popolare il concetto di personalità applicato ai sistemi di intelligenza artificiale, influenzando la percezione pubblica dell’AI come aiutante positivo sempre leale e disponibile nei confronti del compagno umano.
In 1998, IBM's chess supercomputer defeated world champion Garry Kasparov, marking a milestone in the evolution of AI and changing the perception of the game of chess forever.
In 2004, NASA's Mars rovers demonstrated remarkable autonomy and longevity, conducting geological research far beyond their planned 90-day missions.
In the second half of the 90s, these virtual pets introduced millions to the concept of caring for artificial life, normalizing the idea of an emotional connection with digital entities.
Released first in 1998, the Furby was an interactive toy that appeared to learn and develop its own language, bringing adaptive behavior to consumer electronics for the first time.
In 2011, IBM's natural language AI system defeated champions on Jeopardy! Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, showcasing novel language processing skills and surprising information retrieval abilities.
Apple's and Amazon's voice-operated virtual assistants have made conversational AI mainstream and contributed to integrating artificial intelligence into daily life. Despite being among the first commercially successful AI companions, today, they're suffering from competition from LLMs, which make them look significantly less intelligent and effective.
Hanson Robotics' humanoid robot became a media sensation and was even granted Saudi citizenship in 2017, one year before the country made it legal for human women to drive.
In 2016, DeepMind's deep learning AI AlphaGo defeated Go champion Lee Sedol, mastering a game considered impossible to beat for machines. After his demise, Lee Sedol famously commented that the match against AlphaGo felt like "playing a game with someone from a completely different planet."
While not the first transformer-based AI system, OpenAI's image generator marked a breakthrough in applying the technology to visual creation, producing detailed images from text descriptions with consistent results. DALL•E was built upon earlier work, such as GPT-3 and GAN-based systems.
The introduction of large language models capable of human-like conversation, programming, and complex problem-solving marked a new era in AI capabilities that is still currently being explored.