Computers are everywhere – on our desks, shelves, and laps; in our offices, factories, and labs; in grocery stores, gas stations, and hotels; and in our rockets, trains, and cabs. They are ubiquitous.

Computers are also talked about in all types of places and by all types of people. These discourses about computers usually invoke common themes such as their enormous speed of operation, their humongous capacity for storing data, their effectiveness as communication and coordination mediums, their promise for enhancing our mental capabilities, and their potential for undermining our selfhood, identity, and privacy. Outstanding among these, however, is the theme of computers as “thinking machines.” It is to this theme that the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) owes its emergence.

Computers are at the core of AI. In their current incarnation, almost all AI systems are built on the versatile silicon chip, the substrate of digital computers. An overall understanding of electronic computing is, therefore, a prerequisite for appreciating what AI is all about. To understand AI, however, one also must understand many other things that have contributed to its formation and development. These include intellectual history as well as the social, cultural, and institutional environment in which AI is practiced.