10 Centuries-Old Predictions That Actually Came True

2. Artificial Intelligence

When: 1910 Where: 'Moxon's Master' by Ambrose Bierce Intelligent computers might now be a mainstay of science fiction, but it remained an unfathomable idea just a century ago. Ambrose Bierce's short story "Moxon's Master" was all about a highly intelligent, chess-playing robot: "The play was rapid. Moxon hardly glanced at the board before making his moves, and to my unskilled eye seemed to move the piece most convenient to his hand, his motions in doing so being quick, nervous and lacking in precision. The response of his antagonist, while equally prompt in the inception, was made with a slow, uniform, mechanical and, I thought, somewhat theatrical movement of the arm, that was a sore trial to my patience. There was something unearthly about it all, and I caught myself shuddering." The first 'modern' computer emerged around the 1940s, while convincing artificial intelligence came around relatively recently, making Bierce's prediction decades ahead of its time. This idea of artificial intelligence being self aware and exceeding a living human's intelligence would famously be explored by Alan Turing some years later.