| Year |
Event |
| 1980 |
AI industry revenue is a few million dollars per year. |
| 1980 |
Douglas R. Hofstadter wins a Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling Godel,
Escher, Bach. |
| 1980 |
David Marr and Ellen Hildreth publish an important study on edge
detection. |
| 1980 |
The Propaedia section of the fifteenth edition of the Encyclopedia
Britannica represents an ambitious attempt to codify an outline of all human knowledge in
just 800 pages. |
| Early 1980s |
Second-generation robots arrive with the ability to precisely effect
movements with five or six degrees of freedom. They are used for industrial welding and
spray painting. |
| Early 1980s |
The MYCIN project produces NeoMYCIN and ONCOCIN, expert systems that
incorporate hierarchical knowledge bases. They are more flexible than MYCIN. |
| Early 1980s |
Expert systems typically have knowledge bases of about a thousand
rules. |
| 1980s |
The neural-network paradigm begins to make a comeback, as neuron models
are now potentially more sophisticated. Multilayered networks are commonly used. |
| 1981 |
MITI, Japan's ministry for trade and industry, announces plans to
develop by 1990 intelligent computers that will be at least a thousand times as powerful
as the present ones. MITI has a track record of leading Japanese industry to world
dominance in a wide range of fields. |
| 1981 |
Desktop-publishing takes root when Xerox brings out its Star Computer.
However, it will not become popular until Apple's Laserwriter comes onto the market in
1985. Desktop publishing provides writers and artists an inexpensive and efficient way to
compose and print large documents. |
| 1981 |
IBM introduces its personal computer (PC). |
| 1982 |
Compact-disc players are marketed for the first time. |
| 1982 |
A million-dollar advertising campaign introduces Mitch Kapor's Lotus
1-2-3, an enormously popular spreadsheet program. |
| 1982 |
With over 100,000 associations between symptoms and diseases covering
70 percent of all the knowledge in the field, CADUCEUS, an improvement on the Internist
expert system, is developed for internal medicine by Harry Pople and Jack Myers at the
University of Pittsburgh. Tested against cases from the New England Journal of Medicine,
it proves more accurate than humans in a wide range of categories. |
| 1982 |
Defense robots play a vital role in the Israeli destruction of 29
Russian SAM (surface to air missile) sites in a single hour during the invasion of
Lebanon. |
| 1982 |
Japan's ICOT, a corporate consortium formed to meet some of the goals
of the Fifth Generation Project, begins active development with funding of $1 billion
(half from MITI, half from Japanese industry) over ten years. A response is initiated by
the Americans. |
| 1983 |
Edward Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck publish their influential book
The Fifth Generation, on Japan's computer challenge to the world. |
| 1983 |
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) unveils the
Strategic Computing Initiative, a major program for research in microelectronics, computer
architectures, and AI. |
| 1983 |
Six million personal computers are sold in the U.S. |
| 1983 |
Isaac Asimov describes in science fiction novel Robots of Dawn a
society two centuries from now in which a beautiful female scientist and her
"humaniform" lover live in the company of a generation of robotic companions,
servants, teachers, and guards. |
| 1984 |
The European Economic Community forms ESPRIT, a five-year program to
develop intelligent computers. It is launched with $1.5 billion in funding. |
| 1984 |
RACTER, created by William Chamberlain, is the first computer program
to author a book. |
| 1984 |
Ronald Reagan signs legislation to permit the formation of the
Microelectronics and Computer Corp. (MCC), a consortium of 21 companies whose purpose is
to develop intelligent computers. MCC has an annual research budget of $65 million. |
| 1984 |
Waseda University in Tokyo completes Wabot-2, a 200 pound robot that
reads sheet music through its camera eye and plays organ with its ten fingers and two
feet. |
| 1984 |
Optical disks for the storage of computer data are introduced, and IBM
brings out a megabit RAM memory chip with four times the memory of earlier chips. |
| 1985 |
Marvin Minsky publishes The Society of Mind, in which he presents a
theory of the mind in which intelligence is seen to be the result of proper organizations
of a very large number of simple mechanisms, each of which is by itself unintelligent. |
| 1985 |
Jerome Wiesner and Nicholas Negroponte found MIT's Media Laboratory to
do research on applications of aspects of computer science, sociology, and artificial
intelligence to media technology. |
| 1985 |
During this year designs for 6,000 application-specific integrated
circuits (ASICs) are produced. These custom-built chips are being recognized as time and
money savers. |
| 1985 |
Jobs have grown tenfold since 1870: from 12 million to 116 million. The
percentage of the U.S. populace gainfully employed has grown from 31 to 48. Per capita GNP
in constant dollars has increased by 600 percent. These trends are expected to continue. |
| 1985 |
The MIT Media Laboratory creates the first three-dimensional
holographic image to be generated entirely by computer. |
| c. 1985 |
Japan leads the world in robotics development, production, and
application. |
| Mid 1980s |
AI research begins to focus seriously on parallel architectures and
methodologies for problem solving. |
| Mid 1980s |
Third-generation robots arrive with limited intelligence and some
vision and tactile sensing. |
| 1986 |
AI industry revenue is now $1 billion. |
| 1986 |
Albert Lawrence, Alan Schick, and Robert Birge of Carnegie-Mellon
University conduct research focused on the effort to develop a theory of molecular
computing. |
| 1986 |
Dallas police use a robot to break into an apartment. The fugitive runs
out in fright and surrenders. |
| 1986 |
Electronic keyboards account for 55.2 percent of the American musical
keyboard market, up from 9.5 percent in 1980. This trend is expected to continue until the
market is almost all electronic. |
| 1986 |
James McClelland and David Rumelhart edit a set of papers on
neural-network models for intelligence, a collection that will soon become the manifesto
of the new connectionists. |
| 1986 |
Technology for optical character recognition represents a $100 million
industry that is expected to grow to several hundred million by 1990. |
| 1986 |
New medical imaging systems are creating a mini revolution. Doctors can
now make accurate judgements based on views of areas inside our bodies and brains. |
| 1986 |
Using image processing and pattern recognition, Lillian Schwartz comes
up with an answer to a 500-year-old question: Who was the Mona Lisa? Her conclusion:
Leonardo da Vinci himself. |
| 1986 |
Life expectancy is about 74 years in the U.S. Only 3 percent of the
American work force is involved in the production of food. Fully 76 percent of American
adults have high school diplomas, and 7.3 million U.S. students are enrolled in college. |
| 1986 |
Russell Anderson's doctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania is a
robotic ping-pong player that wins against human beings. |
| 1986 |
The best computer chess players are now competing successfully at the
senior master level, with HiTech, the leading chess machine, analyzing 200,000 board
positions per second. |
| 1987 |
Computerized trading helps push NYSE stocks to their greatest
single-day loss. |
| 1987 |
The market for natural-language products (excluding automated speech
recognition) is estimated at $80 million and is expected to grow to $300 million by 1990. |
| 1987 |
Commercial revenue from AI-related technologies in the U.S., excluding
robotics, is now $1.4 billion. It is expected to reach $4 billion by 1990. |
| 1987 |
Current speech systems can provide any one of the following: a large
vocabulary, continuous speech recognition, or speaker independence. |
| 1987 |
Japan develops the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS),
which enables U.S. law enforcement agencies to rapidly track and identify suspects. |
| 1987 |
Robotic-vision systems are now a $300 million industry and
will grow to $800 million by 1990. |
| 1987 |
There are now 1,900 working expert systems, 1,200 more than
last year. The most popular area of application is finance, followed by manufacturing
control and fault diagnosis. |
| 1987 |
XCON, DEC's expert system for configuring computers, has
grown since its introduction in 1980. It now has a knowledge base that incorporates over
10,000 rules and does the work of 300 people more accurately than humans. |
| 1988 |
Computer memory today costs only a tenth of what it did in
1950. |
| 1988 |
The expert systems market is now valued at $400 million, up
from $4 million in 1981. The market is projected to grow to $800 million by 1990. |
| 1988 |
Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert offer their view of recent
developments in neural-network machinery for intelligence in a revised edition of
Perceptrons. |
| 1988 |
The population of industrial robots has increased from a
few hundred in 1970 to several hundred thousand, most of them in Japan. |
| 1988 |
In the U.S. 4,700,000 microcomputers, 120,000
minicomputers, and 11,500 mainframes are sold in this year. |
| 1988 |
W. Daniel Hillis's Connection Machine is capable of 65,536
computations at the same time. |
| 1988 |
Warsaw Pact forces are at least a decade behind NATO forces
in artificial intelligence and other computer technologies. |
| 1989 |
Computational power per unit of cost has roughly doubled
every 18 to 24 months for the past 40 years. |
| 1989 |
The trend from analog to digital will continue to
revolutionize a growing number of industries. |
| 1989 |
Japan, a country very poor in natural resources but rich in
expertise, has become the wealthiest nation on the planet, as measured by the total value
of all assets. |
| Late 1980s |
The core avionics of a typical fighter aircraft uses
200,000 lines of software. The figure is expected to grow to about 1 million in the 1990s.
The U.S. Military as a whole uses about 100 million lines of software (and is expected to
use 200 million by 1993). Software quality becomes an urgent issue that planners are
beginning to address. |
| Late 1980s |
The computer is being recognized as a powerful tool for
artistic expression. |
| Early 1990s |
A profound change in military strategy arrives. The more
developed nations increasingly rely on "smart weapons," which incorporate
electronic copilots, pattern-recognition techniques, and advanced technologies for
tracking, identification, and destruction. |
| Early 1990s |
Continuous speech systems can handle large vocabularies for
specific tasks. |
| Early 1990s |
Computer processors operate at speeds of 100 MIPS. |
| Early 1990s |
Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) technology
makes writing chip programs as easy as writing software programs. |
| 1990s |
A multi-hundred-billion-dollar computer and
information-processing industry is emerging, together with a generation of ubiquitous
machine intelligence that works intimately with its human creators. |
| 1990s |
Significant progress is made toward an intelligent
assistant, a decision-support system capable of a wide variety of administrative and
information-gathering tasks. The system can, for example,prepare a feasibility report on a
project proposal after accessing several databases and talking to human experts. |
| 1990s |
Reliable person identification, using pattern-recognition
techniques applied to visual and speech patterns, replace locks and keys in many
instances. |
| 1990s |
Accomplished musicians, as well as students learning music,
are routinely accompanied by cybernetic musicians. |
| 1990s |
AI technology is of greater strategic importance than
manpower, geography, and natural resources. |
| Late 1990s |
Documents frequently never exist on paper because they
incorporate information in the form of audio and video pieces. |
| Late 1990s |
Media technology is capable of producing computer-generated
personalities, intelligent image systems with some human characteristics. |
| 1999 |
The several-hundred-billion-dollar computer and
information-processing market is largely intelligent by 1990 standards. |
| 2000 |
Three-dimensional chips and smaller component geometries
contribute to a multithousand fold improvement in computer power (compared to a decade
earlier). |
| 2000 |
Chips with over a billion components appear. |
| 2000 |
The world chess champion is a computer. |
| Early 2000s |
Translating telephones allow two people across the globe to
speak to each other even if they do not speak the same language. |
| Early 2000s |
Speech-to-text machines translate speech into a visual
display for the deaf. |
| Early 2000s |
Exoskeletal robotic prosthetic aids enable paraplegic
persons to walk and climb stairs. |
| Early 2000s |
Telephones are answered by an intelligent telephone
answering machine that converses with the calling party to determine the nature and
priority of the call. |
| Early 2000s |
The cybernetic chauffeur, installed in one's car,
communicates with other cars and sensors on the roads. In this way it successfully drives
and navigates from one point to another. |
| Early 21st Century |
Computers dominate the educational environment. Courseware
is intelligent enough to understand and correct the inaccuracies in the conceptual model
of a student. Media technology allows students to interact with simulations of the very
systems and personalities they are studying. |
| Early 21st Century |
The entire production sector of society is operated by a
small number of technicians and professionals. Individual customization of products is
common. |
| Early 21st Century |
Drugs are designed and tested on human biochemical
simulators. |
| Early 21st Century |
Seeing machines for the blind provide both reading and
navigation functions. |
| 2010 |
A personal computer has the ability to answer a large
variety of queries because it will know where to find knowledge. |
| 2020-2050 |
A phone call, which includes highly realistic
three-dimensional moving images, is like visiting with the person called. |
| 2020-2070 |
A computer passes the Turing test, which indicates
human-level intelligence. |
The Age of Spiritual Machines - by
Raymond Kurzweil © 1990,