4.0. Introduction — The Age of the Forge and the Inferno

The Age of the Forge and the Inferno: How the Age of Revolutions Created and Destroyed the Foundations of Artificial Intelligence

In 1937, a student at MIT defended what some consider the most important master's thesis of the twentieth century. Claude Shannon demonstrated that Boolean algebra could describe how electrical circuits function. That same year, in Tokyo, an engineer named Akira Nakashima published exactly the same discovery. Shannon cited him in his paper. Then one became a legend. The other was forgotten.

This double fate encapsulates the period we are now traversing — from the revolutions of 1789 to the total wars of 1945. An era when humanity forged the conceptual tools of artificial intelligence: Leibniz's binary system, Boole's algebra, Ada Lovelace's first program, Turing's universal machine, Colossus, and ENIAC.

But the forge was also an inferno. Wherever Europe extended its dominion, knowledge systems were destroyed. The Maya codices, Japanese mathematical traditions, Aboriginal astronomy, the manuscripts of Timbuktu: so many ways of thinking about calculation that were swept away or forced into silence.

You will meet Benjamin Banneker, a self-taught African American astronomer who predicted eclipses and challenged Jefferson's racial theories. Srinivasa Ramanujan, the Indian genius who proved three thousand theorems with almost no formal education. Seki Takakazu, the "Japanese Newton" who discovered infinitesimal calculus in the isolation of the Edo era. Betty Holberton and the ENIAC programmers, erased from photographs for fifty years.

Six continents. One hundred and fifty-six years of history. And everywhere the same paradox: foundations rising while others collapse.

Welcome to A Brief History of AI, season 4.