AI in America
From Dartmouth to DOGE: How America created Artificial Intelligence, why it claims Supremacy in AI and the plans to keep it that way
From the summer classrooms of Dartmouth in 1956 to the billion-dollar data centers of Silicon Valley, the story of artificial intelligence is, at its core, an American epic. Born from Cold War curiosity and fueled by a culture of invention, AI in America traces how a bold experiment among a handful of scientists gave rise to machines that now write, paint, drive, decide, and more.
This book follows the evolution of AI from theory to dominance through decades of boom and bust, from the rule-based optimism of the 1960s, to the neural revolutions of the 21st century. It reveals how America's unique mix of universities, venture capital, military funding, and sheer ambition made it the global leader in artificial intelligence, and why that supremacy is now being challenged by rivals like China.
AI in America is more than a history; it is a chronicle of innovation, ideology, and power. It shows how algorithms became the new engines of progress, and how a nation built on freedom, risk, and reinvention came to define the age of intelligent machines.
The following are excerpts from the forthcoming book, AI in America.
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Chapter One The Dartmouth Conference 1956 was a very big year indeed in America, but there was one significant event that went larely unnoticed. In a small town in New Hampshire several academics met to discuss a topic few in America knew anything about; something called--for the first time--"artificial intelligence". |
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Chapter Two Cold War Computing Sputnik and ICBMs fueled the fire that ignited U.S. funding for high technology. AI was the indirect recipient of some of the funds, and while these programs didn't write checks for AI, they in effect trained the people, built the labs, and developed the computers that made AI research possible. |
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Chapter Three Silicon Valley and the AI Boom In the midst of Silicon Valley lies Stanford University, the catalyst that transformed the Santa Clara Valley from farmland into the world's tech capital. It has been ground zero for AI research since the field's inception, producing innovations, companies, and leaders who shaped Silicon Valley. |
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Chapter Four The Rise of Machine Learning and Neural Networks Artificial Intelligence in America has always evolved in waves, with periods of explosive discovery followed by long winters of disappointment. But no wave transformed the world more profoundly than the rise of machine learning and deep neural networks. |