Ancient myth: Greek Talos, Hephaestus’s metal servants; Jewish golem.
Early automata: Ctesibius (3rd c. BCE) and Heron (1st c. CE) built self-moving devices.
Medieval/Islamic engineers: Banū Mūsā (9th c.) and al-Jazarī (1206) described programmable water/clockwork automata.
Renaissance–18th c.: Vaucanson’s flute-player and “Digesting Duck” (1730s); “The Turk” chess automaton (1770, a hoax but influential).
Literature: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) on artificial life.
Modern term: “Robot” coined by Karel Čapek in the play R.U.R. (1920), from Czech robota (“forced labor”).
Film: Metropolis (1927) featured a humanoid robot.
Concept existed; computers came later.
Modern concepts
1970s–1980s
Expert systems: MYCIN, XCON.
Industrial robots and PLC control.
1990s
OCR and handwriting for checks and mail; postal sorting.
Chess AIs: Deep Blue.
Web search ranking and anti-spam: PageRank, Naive Bayes filters.
2000s
Recommenders: Amazon, Netflix, YouTube.
Credit scoring and fraud detection.
Speech recognition: Dragon; voice IVR.
Early machine translation: Google Translate.
GPS routing: Google Maps, Waze.
2010s
Deep-learning vision: face unlock, photo tagging.
Virtual assistants: Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa.
Social feeds and ad targeting at scale.
AlphaGo.
Neural MT and real-time captioning.
Keyboard and email autocomplete.
2020s
LLM chatbots: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini.
Code assistants: GitHub Copilot.
Image generators: Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, DALL·E.
Conversational search and summarization.
Driver assist and autonomy pilots: Tesla, Waymo.