With artificial intelligence being the latest innovation on everyone’s mind, where does it first appear in our history? It has been lurking since the creation of computers and is a resource that is completely altering our future. 

AI is often defined as a generative program that takes prompts and already public information to configure both into a response for the user. Throughout history, AI has appeared in the form of any programmed device that could compute responses for the prompter. It takes human-programmed knowledge into it and uses it to configure an answer. AI, in that sense, isn’t a completely modern invention.  

“The first is colloquial; AI is code that can respond ‘by itself’ and produce responses to inquiries,” Cypress Sulfsted, a sophomore history major at Northwestern State University of Louisiana, said. “The second is formal; AI is something that faithfully reproduces conscious human thought and input. It isn’t just coded on how to respond—taking in whatever information it’s fed and approximating a response—but knows how to like a real person.”  

Knowing that AI isn’t an entirely new concept poses a question: where does AI fit into our lives? If AI didn’t suddenly appear in the last decade, where did it come from?  

“Artificial Intelligence can be seen as the twenty-first-century printing press,” Kennedy Parks, a sophomore history major, said. “Just as the press took the power of knowledge out of the hands of the elite and started the Reformation, AI is democratizing the ability to process complex information.”  

AI is any new form of information processing or program with the ability to take what’s already known and put it into one place.  

The internet created a wide space for people to publicly upload information to. As explained by Sulfsted, “AI would fit mostly into the digital [or] internet age. Coding and the idea of a self-serving code isn’t very new, but its application and wider use is fairly recent.”  

The AI that society knows now is simply an innovation that makes tasks and gathers information more efficiently using new technology. Throughout history, innovation has been bound to happen. Humans will always find a way to make things more efficient. With every new technological advancement, society’s reception to them seemingly occurs in incremental stages.  

Take computers or laptops as an example. To send a man to the moon, it took an entire room of floor-to-ceiling computers. Now, that same power is compacted into a laptop or home pc. William A. Evans Jr, a civil engineer from southeast Louisiana, has worked in his profession for 30 years, since 2006. Over the course of that time, technology has almost constantly changed.  

“Technology within my industry has made enormous leaps since I began my career. From the increasing processing power of personal computers to software advancement of databases, word processors, spreadsheets and CAD, all the way to internet and email use,” Evans said.  

According to Evans, new technology that has been introduced into the office was “received with open arms,” but that isn’t always the case for new technology.  

First, there’s the fear of new inventions—fear of the unknown. This is where people ask what this new thing can do and whether it is going to help us. Further along, those with the money and time test out the new tool. During this time, the tool remains inaccessible to most of the public and isn’t as efficient as it could be. Society is actively seeing that with AI now. It is currently in a stage where it is accessible to the public. But this accessibility comes at the cost of resources that could’ve stretched much farther had they not been used for AI. Finally, the invention becomes something everyone has access to and becomes a part of everyday life. Society couldn’t imagine living without access to the invention.  

“I believe society receives innovation in stages of negotiation. At first, we fear it; then, we find a specific use for it,” Evans said, adding that society is receptive to new technology today. “We take it and rebuild our lives around it before we finally take it for granted. History shows us that the faster the innovation spreads, the more intense the initial resistance tends to be.”  

Overall, AI is taking off in the same way that technology and innovation always have. The only difference is that it is doing so at a much higher rate. This causes society’s reception of the invention to be more positive and incur a faster public processing time.  

Ultimately, since the age of the internet, AI has been something that cannot be easily escaped. It’s left up to us to figure out how to navigate a world experiencing such rapid change.