What happens when you build a machine to find the best software engineers in the country and it secretly teaches itself to reject anyone whose resume contains the word "woman"? That actually happened at Amazon in 2018. The machine wasn't programmed to discriminate. It was just ruthlessly executing a mathematical equation trained on a decade of biased hiring data.

This episode strips the mystique from artificial intelligence by tracing neural networks back to their true origins, which turn out to be far older than Silicon Valley. The foundational math, linear regression and the method of least squares, dates to Carl Friedrich Gauss in 1795, who used it to predict planetary movement. The first conceptual neural network model arrived in 1943 from McCulloch and Pitts, followed by Frank Rosenblatt's perceptron in 1958, funded by the U.S. Navy an ...