Books

Toby Walsh
The Shortest History of AI

Last year, almost $1.5 billion was invested in artificial intelligence (AI) every day. Against this colossal financial investment and growing existential panic over its creep, researcher Toby Walsh arrives with a lively retelling of AI’s history. The Shortest History of AI gives a cogent and often comical account of AI’s evolution from a once specialised technology to a now ubiquitous feature of daily life.

The slim book distils AI’s backstory into two distinct periods. First, there is the “symbolic era”, which started in the 1950s and saw machines taught to read symbols and follow specific computer scripts. Now it’s the machine “learning” moment, where computers have been rewired with “neural networks” to engage in complex logic and produce expert answers.

In the beginning, games such as chess and checkers were leveraged by researchers to demonstrate this emergent technology’s “intelligence”. Supercomputers could follow set programs and crunch numbers to excel at digital gameplay. “Their precise rules and clear winners make them a good choice to automate,” Walsh explains.

But a narrow focus on making AI solve problems and build knowledge banks had its limitations, with human oversight usually required. This is where “deep learning” AI – technology modelling our brain’s neural networks – has seen the biggest (and most public) transformation. With products such as Google Translate and ChatGPT, AI can now independently “change complex inputs into complex outputs”.

Here Walsh assuages our anxiety over AI’s threat, by stressing that such tools aren’t yet intelligent – they simply report on what’s probable. Appreciating this nuance highlights how generative chatbots such as ChatGPT often seem deceptively coherent but not always logical. It’s why “hallucination” – where answers they believe are correct are given by bots – reflects the current limitation in AI being truly cerebral, Walsh says.

With the “history of AI … still being written”, Walsh is less convinced of the technology’s imminent threat to our employment but is certain the “AI race” will only become more frenzied to make it smarter and faster. He concedes that AI will eventually advance beyond human intelligence and ruefully reminds readers that we displaced animals with our own brainpower.

The Shortest History of AI is a concise snapshot of AI’s truly disjointed history, one that began with quaint machines solving simple equations to behemoth systems mimicking human intellect. While it’s not a complete antidote to the angst many of us still feel about AI and our future, the book still offers valuable insights on AI’s brief existence – and unlike ChatGPT, it wasn’t all scraped from the internet.

Black Inc, 256pp, $27.99
Black Inc is a Schwartz company

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 24, 2025 as "The Shortest History of AI".

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