>AI is our future and the advance is exponential not linear. From 1700 to now what is the progress towards AI?

In the late 17th century Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz invent calculus. Through the rest of the 1700s mathematics has a huge number of advancements because of it. Things like vectors and spaces began to take shape. In the 1850s people started to play with matrices to solve systems of equations and define spaces and operations. This happened not long after Ada Lovelace created the first programming language to run on the first computer. By the end of the century computers were there from a science perspective, but it would be another twenty years before the first really effective machines are made and another 20 after that to have one fast enough to break enigma. The technology we know today as AI was officially described in 1948 but it's just an idea in linear algebra to create an artificial neuron, to be run on those machines.

From the late 40s to the late 60s there was massive improvements to AI as a technology. Somewhere in there is a program that learns to play checkers to beat any human. The 70s was relatively quiet as AI didn't have the capacity to do very much that was useful on the hardware of the day. There is more in the 1980s as hardware catches up to the idea, but we don't really see anything until the 1990s when deep blue beat Kasparov. Then everyone panicked spent the next ten years saying "the machines will take over in the next couple years". In late 2022 we had another Kasparov event and people go full doomer because the AI drew a picture and wrote code that looks like it could work but doesn't.