Hot take: AI peaked with Taco Bot 3000

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. Footnotes1 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…