AI has been here longer than you think

[harddriver]

 

[NoHassle]

A great observationist who 'appears' on the spectrum somewhat with his delivery to soften the message.

 

[MadAsAHatter]

Didn't watch the video, but yes AI has been around a lot longer than this current trend. I believe @rsm has said he worked with AI for decades.

 

[rsm]

Didn't watch the video, but yes AI has been around a lot longer than this current trend. I believe @rsm has said he worked with AI for decades.

Yes, I wrote and deployed my first AI system in the late 80's; at an insurance company, to "automatically adjudicate medical claims" which was known as "auto-ajudication". It was an expert system / rules engine. It allowed the company to hire data entry clerks, mostly high school and college age, mostly women, who could type fast and accurately...typing on a typewriter was an actual class taught in many schools. These data entry clerks, working for minimum wage, would type in the claim information which would be submitted to the claims processing system, where it went into an input queue for my AI system to process. I used the existing logic of the system, and filled in/replaced the human interactions with automated data lookups and rules in the expert system....if the claim was unable to be processed, it was routed to a human claims adjuster who was trained and salaried, much more costly than the data entry clerks who just typed the information on paper into the computer system.

The first version did simple claims; once that was in production, I updated the expert system / rules to process more complex claims. Then I eft the company...5 years later or so, I heard that it was still running at the company, and had been enhanced many times to handle more types of claims. I left my name in comments throughout the system code...as required by our coding comment standard.

I used this work to get my next job at another insurance company as part of their AI group, which was an expert systems team. I worked with two other people on an insurance underwriting expert system / rules engine, then on to design and code an Executive Information System which I wrote in Borland Turbo Prolog; then onto create a neural network (in C) for fraud detection...then I got into OO programming in around 1992 or so, which eventually got me into Sun Microsystems working on Java solutions, then back into AI using Jini or JXTA, on DoD and commercial projects...I also did J2ME and over the air provisioning where we helped a US wireless carrier create the first 3G network in North America, and where you could "provision", i.e., download and install, client-side apps (J2ME) onto the first smart phones in the early '00s...

I did several AI systems at Sun (and after Sun). At Sun my main focus was on JXTA (peer-to-peer computing solutions) and distributed mobile multi-agent systems and swarm intelligence. I did AI on and off until I retired early in 2025...just as Agentic AI was the new thing in AI....that i was doing back at Sun in the mid-late '00s, albeit with more traditional AI approach and tech.

So yes, I've been doing AI since the dark ages...until I retired.