If you've shipped software in the last three years, you've probably watched your job description quietly rewrite itself. You went from writing code, to writing code with an autocomplete, to writing code with a collaborator, to increasingly writing a spec and watching an agent write, test, and ship the code for you.
That didn't happen overnight. It's the latest chapter in a 70-year story that started with researchers trying to teach machines to play checkers. Let's walk through it, not as a dry timeline, but as the story of how "intelligence" kept getting redefined every time machines got good at the last definition.
Table of Contents
1. The Symbolic Era: Intelligence as Logic (1950s–1980s)
2. Statistics Quietly Eats Symbols (1990s–2000s)
