This year marks the platinum jubilee for artificial intelligence. On August 31, 1955, John McCarthy and his colleagues proposed a summer workshop at Dartmouth College, coining the term “Artificial Intelligence” to distinguish their idea from the prevailing concept of “cybernetics.” This 13-page proposal became the field’s birth certificate.

In 1973, my first year of high school, we were warned that detention awaited anyone who used the new calculators in class. The slide rule remained mandatory. Teachers feared the shiny Radio Shack EC-100, released a year earlier, would diminish our ability to use natural reasoning.

In January 2023, I introduced the new ChatGPT 3.5 at a faculty meeting, where it quickly generated a well-written two-page essay, leaving the room silent. Some departments banned it, but a year later, my college began training faculty on AI tools and encouraged their use in the curriculum.

The pattern feels familiar: invention, suspicion, adoption, commonality. Each generation meets new tools with fear that they will steal our jobs and degrade our minds. Yet what is discouraged in one decade becomes essential in the next.

The impetus for intelligent machines predates McCarthy’s proposal. Centuries earlier, pioneers were already wrestling with what it meant to mechanize knowledge, with a majority hesitant about new solutions.

In 1753, Benjamin Franklin received a gold medal from the Royal Society for capturing lightning with a sharpened metal rod. The same year, The Gentlemen’s Magazine published a repudiation: “We are come at last to touch the celestial fire … like Prometheus … we may be brought too late to repent of our temerity.” Franklin was celebrated as a genius and scolded as a fool in the same year. Society’s wonder and suspicion are always side by side.

In July 1945, engineer Vannevar Bush highlighted the impending information explosion following World War II and proposed the “Memex,” a machine designed to supplement human memory. In his article for The Atlantic Monthly, he argued that electronic tools should enhance the mind, influencing future developments in hypertext, personal computing, and artificial intelligence.

In October 1950, Alan Turing reframed the debate about machine intelligence in MIND Magazine by asking, “Can machines think?” He proposed a practical test: If a machine’s responses are indistinguishable from those of a human, it should be deemed intelligent. Today, millions test Turing’s thesis daily through interactions with chatbots.

McCarthy’s seminal 1955 Dartmouth proposal took the next leap, gathering scientists to explore whether human intelligence could be encoded so that machines could replicate it. “Every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it,” the proposal declared as a goal.

Despite economic progress, suspicion lingered. The 1970s calculator panic mirrored today’s AI debates. TIME Magazine in January 1976 lamented that “electronic slide rules” weakened students’ minds. In my high school, calculators could earn detention (especially when spelling “7734” upside down). Yet within a decade, they became staples in math classrooms, transforming the once-feared “Promethean fire” into the routine.

This cycle is not unique to calculators or chatbots; it is the very rhythm of human technological change. Since the sharpened stone and stick, humans have been wary of technology at first, and then began using it for both good and evil.

Human history shows a robust demand for tools that extend our labor and our thought. From lightning rods to machine learning, each invention followed the same path: invention, suspicion, adoption, and finally, commonality. Within one lifetime, from the barn-sized ENIAC Computer to today, doctors now summarize verbal notes and detect precancerous cells in advanced medical imaging with pocket- sized computers. What was once deemed astonishing in 1946 is routine by 2025.

The overarching truth is that AI is not a conspiratorial intrusion into society; it is the natural continuation of it. From Franklin’s lightning rod to ChatGPT, every step reflected the same drive: to push the boundaries of intelligence outward and into our tools.

Seventy years on, Artificial Intelligence deserves its birthday cake not as a stranger, but as a colleague. Like every new invention, it has been met with both wonder and concern. Like many innovations, it will become part of our daily routine.

Current AI trends have been titled as the “Pong Years,” with a long way to go. So, happy birthday, Artificial Intelligence! You are 70 years old and just getting started.

Professor Dennis Natali, PhD, is the AI Innovation Chair at Pikes Peak State College.