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Minds & Machines

78 parts · ~33 hours of reading · last updated Jun 29, 2026

Minds & Machines is a 75-article deep-dive into the full history of Artificial Intelligence — from the ancient myths of mechanical life to the reasoning models reshaping the world today. Written for a general audience with no technical background, each article is approximately 8,000 words of narrative, immersive, story-driven history.

  1. 01
    The Ancient Dream of Artificial Life
    ·28 min read
  2. 02
    Ada Lovelace: The First Programmer the World Forgot
    ·25 min read
  3. 03
    The Dartmouth Conference, 1956: The Summer AI Was Born
    ·28 min read
  4. 04
    Clockwork Wonders: The Automata Era
    ·27 min read
  5. 05
    Alan Turing: The Man Who Invented the Future
    ·26 min read
  6. 06
    The Turing Test, 1950: The Question That Still Has No Answer
    ·29 min read
  7. 07
    The Philosophers Who Asked 'Can Machines Think?'
    ·29 min read
  8. 08
    John von Neumann: The Man Who Designed the Modern Computer
    ·26 min read
  9. 09
    The Logic Theorist, 1956: The First AI Program
    ·29 min read
  10. 10
    Ada Lovelace & The First Algorithm
    ·32 min read
  11. 11
    Norbert Wiener: The Father of Cybernetics
    ·31 min read
  12. 12
    ELIZA, 1966: The Chatbot That Made People Cry
    ·28 min read
  13. 13
    Alan Turing: The Man Who Imagined Everything
    ·27 min read
  14. 14
    Claude Shannon: The Man Who Invented Information
    ·29 min read
  15. 15
    The Lighthill Report, 1973: The Document That Killed AI
    ·28 min read
  16. 16
    The Summer That Named AI
    ·28 min read
  17. 17
    John McCarthy: The Man Who Named AI
    ·30 min read
  18. 18
    The First AI Winter, 1974–1980: The Great Disillusionment
    ·31 min read
  19. 19
    The First AI Programs: Teaching Machines to Play Games
    ·28 min read
  20. 20
    Marvin Minsky: The Brilliant Optimist Who Got It Wrong
    ·27 min read
  21. 21
    The Rise of Expert Systems, 1980: AI Gets a Job
    ·30 min read
  22. 22
    ELIZA and the Illusion of Understanding
    ·27 min read
  23. 23
    Allen Newell & Herbert Simon: The Dynamic Duo of Early AI
    ·30 min read
  24. 24
    Japan's Fifth Generation Project, 1982: The Billion-Dollar Gamble
    ·29 min read
  25. 25
    The Optimists: When AI Was Going to Solve Everything
    ·27 min read
  26. 26
    Joseph Weizenbaum: The Man Who Built ELIZA and Regretted It
    ·29 min read
  27. 27
    The Second AI Winter, 1987–1993: Lightning Strikes Twice
    ·29 min read
  28. 28
    The First AI Winter: When the Dream Crashed
    ·28 min read
  29. 29
    Frank Rosenblatt: The Forgotten Father of Neural Networks
    ·27 min read
  30. 30
    Backpropagation Goes Mainstream, 1986: The Algorithm That Refused to Die
    ·28 min read
  31. 31
    Expert Systems: AI Learns to Be a Specialist
    ·26 min read
  32. 32
    Geoffrey Hinton: The Stubborn Godfather
    ·28 min read
  33. 33
    Deep Blue vs. Kasparov, 1997: The Match the World Watched
    ·28 min read
  34. 34
    Japan's Billion-Dollar Bet on AI
    ·26 min read
  35. 35
    Yann LeCun: The Rebel with a Vision
    ·28 min read
  36. 36
    The Netflix Prize, 2006: The Moment the Crowd Beat the Experts
    ·27 min read
  37. 37
    The Second AI Winter: Lightning Strikes Twice
    ·26 min read
  38. 38
    Yoshua Bengio: The Conscience of AI
    ·27 min read
  39. 39
    The ImageNet Project, 2009: Teaching Machines to See
    ·26 min read
  40. 40
    The Godfathers Go Underground
    ·28 min read
  41. 41
    Jürgen Schmidhuber: The Angry Genius
    ·23 min read
  42. 42
    AlexNet, 2012: The Breakthrough Nobody Saw Coming
    ·24 min read
  43. 43
    The Rise of the Thinking Machine: Deep Learning Takes Over
    ·25 min read
  44. 44
    Fei-Fei Li: The Woman Who Taught Machines to See
    ·25 min read
  45. 45
    The Transformer, 2017: Attention Is All You Need
    ·23 min read
  46. 46
    The Attention Economy: How the Transformer Changed Everything
    ·24 min read
  47. 47
    Sam Altman & OpenAI: The Organisation That Changed Everything
    ·27 min read
  48. 48
    AlphaGo vs. Lee Sedol, 2016: The Game That Humbled Humanity
    ·26 min read
  49. 49
    The Race to AGI: When Silicon Valley Decided to Change the World
    ·27 min read
  50. 50
    Demis Hassabis & DeepMind: Science as the Goal
    ·24 min read
  51. 51
    AlphaFold, 2020: The Protein Folding Revolution
    ·23 min read
  52. 52
    The Alignment Problem: Can We Build AI That Wants What We Want?
    ·26 min read
  53. 53
    Dario & Daniela Amodei: Building AI You Can Trust
    ·22 min read
  54. 54
    ChatGPT, 2022: When AI Became Everyone's Business
    ·24 min read
  55. 55
    The Bias Problem: When AI Reflects Our Worst Selves
    ·23 min read
  56. 56
    Ilya Sutskever: The Mind That Saw the Future
    ·21 min read
  57. 57
    The Great Pause: The Moment the AI World Held Its Breath
    ·23 min read
  58. 58
    What AI Cannot Do: The Limits of the Possible
    ·23 min read
  59. 59
    Kate Crawford: The Woman Who Mapped the AI Atlas
    ·23 min read
  60. 60
    The GPT-4 Moment: One Year That Changed Everything
    ·23 min read
  61. 61
    The Labour Question: What Happens When AI Does the Work?
    ·24 min read
  62. 62
    Timnit Gebru: The Researcher Who Wouldn't Back Down
    ·23 min read
  63. 63
    The Multimodal Moment: When AI Learned to See, Hear, and Speak
    ·23 min read
  64. 64
    The Consciousness Question: Does AI Experience Anything?
    ·22 min read
  65. 65
    Geoffrey Hinton's Farewell: The Godfather Who Changed His Mind
    ·21 min read
  66. 66
    The AI Election: When Synthetic Media Met Democracy
    ·12 min read
  67. 67
    The Governance Gap: Can Humanity Govern What It Has Built?
    ·23 min read
  68. 68
    Yann LeCun: The Architect Who Disagrees
    ·22 min read
  69. 69
    The Agentic Turn: When AI Started Doing Things
    ·22 min read
  70. 70
    The Science of AI: What Research Still Needs to Answer
    ·22 min read
  71. 71
    Yoshua Bengio: The Scientist Who Changed Sides
    ·18 min read
  72. 72
    The Scientific AI: When Machines Became Research Partners
    ·22 min read
  73. 73
    The Memory Machine: How AI Changes What We Know and How We Know It
    ·19 min read
  74. 74
    Stuart Russell: The Philosopher of AI Safety
    ·21 min read
  75. 75
    The Reasoning Models: When AI Learned to Think Before Speaking
    ·22 min read
  76. 76
    The Future of Creativity: Art, Music, and Writing in the AI Age
    ·29 min read
  77. 77
    Sam Altman Returns: The Year That Made OpenAI
    ·38 min read
  78. 78
    The Open Source Wars: When AI Went Free
    ·31 min read

How to read this series

Start at part 1 and read through — each part builds on the one before. Or pick any part that interests you; each is self-contained enough to read on its own. Once you're in a post, the prev/next nav at the end will walk you through the whole series.