A Tragicomedy About AI

Brief History of the Modern AI

David Goudet
8 min readDec 5, 2023

The Document That Shaped Our Modern World

1935, a young child named Walter Pitts is running away from bullies, his only escape is to hide in a library.

Image created by Midjourney, but with a lot of effort into the prompt :)

Not wanting to risk another chase that night, Pitts stayed hidden until the library closed for the evening, he spent three days there. As he wandered through the stacks of books he came across Principia Mathematica, and proceeded to read it cover to cover in the next few weeks.

Walter Pitts had an awful childhood: his father was uneducated, regarded Walter as a freak, and had no trouble raising his fists to get his way. However, Walter developed an obsession with science.

This little guy, fearful and nerdy, like any stereotypical scientist, started the AI revolution, he created systems that are embedded today in the core of ChatGPT or Google.

1943

We are in the middle of World War II, the first modern computers are being developed for military research. Thousands of brilliant minds are working on this, like Alan Turing in England and John Von Neumann in the US.

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David Goudet

Senior Software Engineer from Venezuela living in Madrid. Top Writer in AI and Technology. Singularity University/US Dept of State alumni.