Living in 1999 felt like standing on the edge of an event horizon. Our growing obsession with technology was spilling into an outpouring of hope, fear, angst – and even apocalyptic distress in some quarters. The dot-com bubble was swelling as the World Wide Web began spreading like a Californian wildfire. The first cell phones had been making the world feel much more connected. Let's not forget the anxieties over Y2K that were escalating into panic as we approached the bookend of the century.
But as this progress was catching the imagination of so many, artificial intelligence (AI) was in a sorry state – only beginning to emerge from a debilitating second 'AI winter' which spanned between 1987 and 1993.
