Simulmatics as a company was established in 1959 and declared bankruptcy in 1970. The founders picked this name as a mash of ‘simulation’ and ‘automatic’, hoping to coin a new term that would live for decades, which apparently didn’t happen! They worked on building what they called the People Machine to simulate and predict human behavior. It was marketed as a revolutionary technology that would completely change business, politics, warfare and more. Doesn’t this sound familiar?!
Benjamín Labatut draws a line from the Vedas to George Boole and Claude Shannon onward to Geoffrey Hinton and Frank Herbert’s Butlerian Jihad.
In the coming years, as people armed with AI continue making the world faster, stranger, and more chaotic, we should do all we can to prevent these systems from giving more and more power to the few who can build them.
The fascinating—and tragic—story of Walter Pitts and Walter McCulloch whose lives and work intersected with Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann:
Thanks to their work, there was a moment in history when neuroscience, psychiatry, computer science, mathematical logic, and artificial intelligence were all one thing, following an idea first glimpsed by Leibniz—that man, machine, number, and mind all use information as a universal currency. What appeared on the surface to be very different ingredients of the world—hunks of metal, lumps of gray matter, scratches of ink on a page—were profoundly interchangeable.
This anthology of Steve Jobs interviews, announcements and emails is available to read for free as a nicely typeset web book.
An account of the mother of all demos, written by Steven Johnson.
A terrific six-part series of short articles looking at the people behind the history of Artificial Intelligence, from Babbage to Turing to JCR Licklider.
The history of AI is often told as the story of machines getting smarter over time. What’s lost is the human element in the narrative, how intelligent machines are designed, trained, and powered by human minds and bodies.
How to improve Google’s search results and the World Wide Web in one fell swoop.
Brian Eno on prototyping and fidelity.
Large language models are big messy brushes, not scalpels.
The best of the web is under continuous attack from the technology that powers your generative “AI” tools.
Three designers I know have been writing about large language models.