Could we ever write a history of AI?

 In recent years I have become more and more obsessed with AI, much like everyone else in society. In this regard I am very fascinated by two different aspects were the first is simply the implementation of AI in my own discipline of history. In this regard I can mainly see two were clearcut utilizations of artificial intelligence were the first in software such as Transkribus, which transcribes old hand-written records to modern print in a matter of minutes. Transkribus have actually become smart enough to have a 99,3 percent correctness, compared to the human 99,7 percent correctness. Even though we still have a bit to wander with transkribus it will probably change what subjects historians can dwelve into, since one of the key difficulties with older periods is the material aspect and reading of texts. Once this obstacle is overcome it would perhaps not require as much training to go into the medieval or early modern period. A second aspect of this is that AI will probably, given the possibility to transcribe data, also trigger a development towards more quantative methods. In previous decades historians have been forced to first transcribe (a time consuming task) and then translate data into machinereadble statistics. With AI this will probably be much less time consuming and open up new ways to interpret historical figures. Perhaps AI will also evolve into assisting historians working with language based methods, such as discourse analysis. 

Another aspect of AI I however is intrested in is how the technology reshapes society at various levels, from our information consumption to legislation. In this regard it is however clear that it exists both expectations that AI probably never will meet, as was as areas of utilization that we are not aware of yet. However, in studying social change and AI I have also become quite interested in the historical foundations of AI, and what has struck me is the lack of clear "AI history". With this I mean a form of book or article that goes from the advances made by Turring in 1951, onwards towards the Darthmout conference in 1956 and so forth. This is a book that is rather obvious on the need to write, but yet there is a clear lack of text dealing with this form of intellectual/technological history. 

One would be tempted to explain this lack of studies to many historians being rather unintrested in technology and lacking the technical skills to understand the developments. Whilst the first might be true for historians in general, it seems to me like unprobable that this is true for the entire population of historians. Furthermore, one would not really to have deep technical insights into the programming behind AI in order to write the history of it's breakthroughs. Instead I think that the lack of such texts should be viewed in two different lights: namely the rather vague understanding of what AI actually is and secondly that AI is not the result of a singular line of thought. 

I have read quite a few introductionary books on AI, and all of them have different points of depatures when describing what AI is and what it can do. A common description is that AI have the ability to think and act intellectually like human does, which is a very wide description and further does not really describe our current AI. Other scientist have defined AI as a machine that can take in information from it's surronding and then act on it, and then learn from the feedback. This is, as pointed out in for instance "mission AI" by Sheik et al a very simplistic view, since for instance thermostate acts in a similar way where it can notice that temperature is to low, increase it's output, measure again and then either further increase it's output or maintain the current. Yet no one would actually call such an analogue tool for AI. It is thus clear that it is very hard for a historian to actually write the history of AI, since there does not exist a clear cut definition of what AI is. Another problem is that AI have not evolved in a single field. In the very early stage of "digital AI" it actually developed from insights in both behavorial science, mathematics, computer science and neurology. To write a general history of AI would thus require insight in several of these fields, and yet there exists a clear possibility that the historian will overlook some crucial development in a obscure field. 

Schematic of AI history in Mission AI by Sheikh et al p.36


I myself do not find "a history of AI" to be the most crucial thing to write in the field of digital humanities. Still I can not help but to for some extent long for it, since it will probably play an important part in introductionary courses on AI. As paradoxe as this might seem, we might actually need to have a much better AI that can guide is in writing it's own history before serious efforts can be undertaken. 

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