January 2026
Intermediate to advanced
256 pages
5h
English
Content preview from The Next Renaissance
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
CHAPTER 1The Past, Present, and Future of Artificial Intelligence
I know you're here to think about the future, but we can't chart where we're going without knowing where we've been. The history of AI is inspiring. It is a timeline of thinkers bold enough to wonder and build beyond what machines could do toward what they might do. Artificial intelligence is proof of what science, imagination, and optimism can create.
The roots of artificial intelligence are nearly as old as modern computing itself. In the summer of 1956, a young Dartmouth professor, John McCarthy, convened a workshop to explore the notion of “thinking machines.” The conversations built on the groundbreaking ideas of Alan Turing, the British mathematician who had laid the foundation for digital computing and proposed a means for testing machine intelligence.1 The gathering gave the field both its name, artificial intelligence, and its ambition: to create machines that could equal human intelligence, and one day surpass it.
McCarthy's summit inspired scientists from around the world to start exploring the subject. Soon, experts were standing in front of computers, closer in size to industrial kitchens than office desks, boldly declaring that in the near future machines would be able to beat the best human chess players in the world. The 1960s, however, passed without such an upset. Progress slowed, funding diminished, and the dream of AI fell dormant.
The coming decades brought a few “false dawns,” small advances ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.