History indicates that major technological changes can take about half a century to go from the first lab drawings to society. Alan Turing first proposed the Turing machine, laying the foundations of computation, in 1936; the first general-purpose “Turing-complete” system was built in 1945, and “The Computer” was only named “Machine of the Year” by Time in 1982, about half a century later.

The foundations of the internet were laid out during the 1960s, but consumers did’t get to broadly use and benefit from it until the mid- to late 1990s. For most people, artificial intelligence was strictly a sci-fi concept until recent years.

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