“And all them fat cats they just think it's funny

I'm going on the town now looking for easy money.” – Bruce Springsteen.

“Technology is too important to be left to technologists.” – Richard Susskind, How to Think About AI

“Kabhi kabhi yun bhi humne apne ji ko behlaya hai, jin baton ko khud nahi samjhe auron ko samjhaya hai.” – Nida Fazli

In 1956, John McCarthy and Malvin Minsky organised a summer-long workshop on artificial intelligence(AI) at the Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States.

The workshop was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The term AI was coined by McCarthy specifically for this workshop and has stuck since then, though what the term stands for has continuously evolved over the years. 

In 1970, Minsky told Life magazine: “From three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being. I mean a machine that will be able to read Shakespeare, grease a car, play office politics, tell a joke, have a fight. At that point the machine will begin to educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months it will be at genius level and a few months after that its powers will be incalculable.”

We are in 2026, and we are still a long way from what Minsky – one of the pioneers of AI – thought was achievable by 1978. Nonetheless, breathless and grandiose predictions on the future of AI continue to be made. 

Artificial intelligence is being sold as the next great economic revolution. Governments, corporations and investors have raced to embrace it. But history suggests technological revolutions rarely transform economies as quickly as their evangelists claim.

Indeed, AI will reshape work, but its impact will likely unfold more gradually than predicted, unevenly and with real social costs. But before we get to that let’s sample a few breathless predictions that have been made over the years.