#142 — AI Was Already Here | From Cybernetics to ChatGPT

Artificial intelligence feels like it exploded into our lives overnight.

But did it?

In DWO EP142 — AI Was Already Here, Jimmy, Jeremy, Josh and Kane go digging through the history of artificial intelligence and discover that the machines have been creeping into our lives for a hell of a lot longer than ChatGPT would have you believe.

The trail runs from 1940s cybernetics and artificial-neuron research, through Alan Turing, the 1956 Dartmouth AI project, early machine learning, ELIZA, DARPA-funded research, expert systems, computer chess, game opponents, search engines, fraud detection, GPS, recommendation algorithms, Siri and Alexa—all the way to modern generative AI.

And then there’s 1973.

A Super Friends episode called “Professor Goodfellow’s G.E.E.C.” warned kids about a giant computer designed to eliminate human labor, brainwork and responsibility. More than fifty years later, we’re still having essentially the same argument.

So what actually changed?

Was AI invented recently—or did it finally become powerful, conversational and visible enough that ordinary people could no longer ignore it?

The guys get into the AI Effect, the difference between automation and intelligence, whether Pac-Man ghosts count as AI, why computers beating humans at chess stopped impressing us, what Gen X was already living with before anybody called it artificial intelligence, and the bigger human question underneath all of it:

If the machine is willing to do our thinking for us, how much thinking are we willing to give away?

Plus: August 18th 1980s stumpers, Gen X detours, arguments over what actually counts as intelligence, and the usual DWO rabbit holes.

Featured cover co-host: Jeremy

Episode outro:
“Mark Me Human” — Auditory Ecstasy

Because maybe the question isn’t whether machines become human.

Maybe it’s what happens when humans decide they’d rather become more like the machine.