Artificial Intelligence: The Brand That Wouldn’t Die

Everyone is talking about AI, but what are we talking about when we talk about artificial intelligence? Why were chess computers and self-driving cars called AI, but not Google Maps? Why were neural network technologies called machine learning in the 2000s but AI today? As a historian with training in AI and computer science, Thomas Haigh is uniquely well equipped to answer those questions. Taking a longer historical view demonstrates that the technologies and techniques associated with AI have shifted dramatically and have no enduring connection to the study of cognition.

This history makes more sense if we conceptualize artificial intelligence as a brand rather than a technological field or coherently bounded science. Among other things brands demarcate ownership, impute properties to artifacts, sustain narratives, battle for market share, and of course sell products. Since its introduction in 1955 AI has been primarily an aspirational luxury brand, selling researchers and labs to elite universities and funding agencies rather than products to consumers. Brands can be tainted by overextension, as AI was in the 1980s, and revived around new product lines as AI was in the 2010s. AI has been both an institutionalized subfield of computer science, with textbooks and curricula, and a long-unrealized dream with close ties to science fiction narratives.

THOMAS HAIGH | University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

Seminar cycle: “AI and history“

Organization:
Federico Mazzini (Università degli Studi di Padova)
Andrea Pojer (Università di Trento – FBK-ISIG)
Massimo Rospocher (FBK-ISIG)
Sandra Toffolo (FBK-ISIG)

ISIG is accredited or qualified to provide training for school staff in Trentino.

The event will be held ONLINE in English.

Registration is mandatory by 6 November 2026 at noon.

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Image: AdobeStock_1037404632