Artificial intelligence has evolved from theoretical concept to transformative technology. What began as a philosophical question—can machines think?—now shapes industries from healthcare to entertainment.
The term "artificial intelligence" was coined at Dartmouth College in 1956. Early AI focused on symbolic reasoning—programming explicit rules. Expert systems of the 1980s encoded human knowledge for specific domains but proved brittle outside their narrow bounds.
Machine learning changed everything. Instead of programming rules, researchers trained systems on data. Neural networks, inspired by brain structure, learned to recognize patterns. Deep learning—neural networks with many layers—enabled breakthroughs in image recognition, language processing, and game-playing.