- Ancient myth: Greek Talos, Hephaestus’s metal servants; Jewish golem. - Early automata: Ctesibius (3rd c. BCE) and Heron (1st c. CE) built self-moving devices. - Medieval/Islamic engineers: Banū Mūsā (9th c.) and al-Jazarī (1206) described programmable water/clockwork automata. - Renaissance–18th c.: Vaucanson’s flute-player and “Digesting Duck” (1730s); “The Turk” chess automaton (1770, a hoax but influential). - Literature: Mary Shelley’s _Frankenstein_ (1818) on artificial life. - Modern term: “Robot” coined by Karel Čapek in the play _R.U.R._ (1920), from Czech _robota_ (“forced labor”). - Film: _Metropolis_ (1927) featured a humanoid robot. Concept existed; computers came later. Modern concepts **1970s–1980s** - Expert systems: MYCIN, XCON. - Industrial robots and PLC control. **1990s** - OCR and handwriting for checks and mail; postal sorting. - Chess AIs: Deep Blue. - Web search ranking and anti-spam: PageRank, Naive Bayes filters. **2000s** - Recommenders: Amazon, Netflix, YouTube. - Credit scoring and fraud detection. - Speech recognition: Dragon; voice IVR. - Early machine translation: Google Translate. - GPS routing: Google Maps, Waze. **2010s** - Deep-learning vision: face unlock, photo tagging. - Virtual assistants: Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa. - Social feeds and ad targeting at scale. - AlphaGo. - Neural MT and real-time captioning. - Keyboard and email autocomplete. **2020s** - LLM chatbots: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. - Code assistants: GitHub Copilot. - Image generators: Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, DALL·E. - Conversational search and summarization. - Driver assist and autonomy pilots: Tesla, Waymo.