AI peaked in 20141 with the invention of the Taco Bot 30002.
With artificial (taco) intelligence and the latest cheese dispensing technology, it truly represented the summit of human technological achievement the likes of which we might not see again3.
Footnotes
1 Yes, Taco Bot’s song came out in 2019, teaching us about the far-reaching capabilities of this high-powered platform, but a prototype Taco Bot with a reduced featureset was seen in 2014’s Raining Tacos.
2 Is it AI? The term gets thrown-around a lot nowadays and refers to a lot of different technologies, let’s not forget that that’s always been the case. Was the El Ajedrecista machine (1914) AI? Arguably, yes: even though it was effectively using a ruleset, it achieved its goal of exhibiting a behaviour that had previously been argued to be demonstrative of human intelligence, and beyond the capability of an automaton (consider also the Nimatron from 1940). Looking for something less-deterministic? The Ising Model (1920) could be argued to have been the first neural net. It didn’t attempt to “act” in a way that most humans think of when they consider “AI”, but it used fundamentally the same model as future artificial neural nets did. By 1950, Turing and von Neumann had laid-out more-concrete definitions of machine “thought”, some of which had, at least conceptually, already been demonstrated by the above examples, but if you don’t consider response precomputation a valid AI strategy, then consider Prinz’s Chess (1951) which calculated on-the-fly solutions. Or if your view on AI is sufficiently narrow that you only consider a “chatbot” to count, let’s not forget that ELIZA got there in 1965. My point is that there’s a whole lot of things that can and have been legitimately called AI, and a walking, talking, bad-guy-fighting, taco-dispensing robot might certainly count, in my mind.
3 By which I mean to say, the Raining Tacos saga by Parry Gripp (whom you’ve almost certainly come across either from his silly videos or else because he performed the Buffy the Vampire Slayer theme song) finally came to an end in April of this year after taking 14 years to release 9 short songs. If you blinked and missed the last decade and a half of Internet wackiness, go watch the director’s cut of the whole thing, which came out last month.
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