“This is only a foretaste of what is to come and only the shadow of what is going to be.”

These words appear on the fifty pound note issued by the Bank of England, under the portrait of their speaker, Alan Turing. They come from an interview with Turing in The Times in 1949, and continue, “We have to have some experience with the machine before we really know its capabilities. It may take years before we settle down to the new possibilities, but I do not see why it should not enter any one of the fields normally covered by the human intellect, and eventually compete on equal terms.”

The current wave of innovation in AI has led to more excitement about the last part of this quote than the rest, “I do not see why it should not enter any one of the fields normally covered by the human intellect, and eventually compete on equal terms.” Much of the press and social media, along with masses of marketing material, would have us believe that AI models are already competing on equal terms with humans, even if every article about how an AI model has passed the bar exam, or leapt some other professional hurdle, seems to be offset by another article questioning the legitimacy of the test, and yet another giving examples of how the model got things wrong in hilarious ways.

‘Look who it is! Iron Man using his jet skates! Those transistor powered wheels of his can do 200 miles an hour!’

If you are familiar with the superhero Iron Man from Marvel movies, you may be surprised by the idea that he would be travelling using skates, rather than flying. However, if you are familiar with electronics, you may be more surprised by the idea that wheels could be transistor powered.

This is a quote from an Iron Man comic in the 1960s. Some things in the comic are the same as the movies of today: Iron Man is a flawed human in a metal suit which enables him to do astonishing things. Some things are very different: the armour is chunky and does a lot more rolling than flying. And, rather than being powered by nanotechnology wizardry, it is powered by transistors.

On 9th December 1968, Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institure, gave what was later called ‘the mother of all demos’. In a 100 minute session, he demonstrated the capabilities of the oNLine-System (or NLS - they had terrible abbreviations in the 1960s too), including features which we would not see in commercial computing for many years: windows, hyperlinks, real-time collaboration, video-conferencing and the use of a mouse. It’s striking how familiar the experience is (even down to elements of the demo going wrong), and it’s not surprising that Engelbart got a standing ovation at the end.

However, once you get used to seeing technical advance after technical advance, all described in Engelbart’s calm and level voice, one more thing stands out in the demo: the conception of computing as a means to augment what Engelbart calls ‘intellectual work’, a goal which he also makes clear in his paper, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Engelbart decided to pursue computing after the Second World War, with the goal of turning machines which had previously been solely used for calculation into machines which could be used to help people think and work collectively.