The Shortest History of AI: The Six Essential Ideas That Animate It

by Toby Walsh Narrated by Michael Langan

Overview

Since Alan Turing first posed the question "Can machines think?" artificial intelligence has evolved from a speculative idea to a transformative force. The Shortest History of AI traces this evolution, from Ada Lovelace's visionary work to IBM's groundbreaking defeat of the chess world champion and the revolutionary emergence of ChatGPT. It also explores AI's cultural journey, touching on classics such as Frankenstein, A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Revealing how many "overnight" successes were decades in the making, this accessible and illuminating book helps us to understand how AI functions by explaining the six key ideas that animate it: it searches for answers using predetermined symbols and means-end analysis; it bases its answers on what sort of response it thinks it will get; it follows a set of rules in order to simulate human expertise; it copies the human brain by learning from experience; it uses reinforcement learning, rewarding its own successes and punishing itself for its failures; and it uses Bayes' theorem to calculate the probability of a cause based on its effect.

Fast-paced and rich with facts, The Shortest History of AI equips listeners to understand where we've been-and where we're headed.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"This enjoyable, wide-ranging, and compact survey explains where we began and where we now find ourselves. An entertaining and concise tour."— Kirkus

"This history of AI in six simple ideas is so informative and easy to digest. Essential reading!"— Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki

"One of the world’s brightest minds takes on one of the world’s biggest topics. . . . Delicious!"— Adam Spencer

Kirkus Reviews

2025-08-13
A revolutionary technology that’s been around longer than you might think.

Walsh, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales, has written four previous books on AI. This volume in the Shortest History series distills large topics into essential ideas, showing how AI has quietly worked its way into our daily lives, from freeway lanes to phones. The narrative reaches back—before 1956, when the AI field was named at a Dartmouth College workshop—to historical moments in the invention of computation. Notable figures including Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and Alan Turing appear as cameos, along with HAL, R2-D2, C-3PO, and other famous real and fictional robots embodying our evolving concept of intelligence. Familiar games, notably tic-tac-toe, chess, and Go, played an important role in early computer research. However, a computer’s impressive mastery of a game with well-defined rules is an imperfect analog to our complex, multifaceted human intelligence. From industrial robots to self-driving cars to ChatGPT, AI has become a thinking tool. Walsh describes current approaches to modeling the brain using neural networks, beginning with government-funded research efforts by Warren McCulloch, Seymour Papert, Marvin Minsky, and other fascinating thinkers. The author notes several long stretches—“AI Winters”—in which government funding dried up and research slowed, though motives and money are largely out of view here. He also details some of the rivalries, complicated genealogies, and cross-pollination of present-day AI players, with people and ideas leaping between organizations, namely Meta, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft. This enjoyable, wide-ranging, and compact survey explains where we began and where we now find ourselves. For a deeper look at risks and rewards in the AI gold rush, the notes and index provide a good starting point.

An entertaining and concise tour of the rapidly developing domain of artificial intelligence.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940195393670
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	11/18/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged