Who knew that without WW2 we most likely would not have had AI created?

2 geniuses set the pillars of what we now call Artificial Intelligence

👴Part 1 – The Grandfather: Alan Turing

Long before “artificial intelligence” became the hottest buzzword, a quiet genius planted the seed for everything we now call AI. In the 1930s, Alan Turing imagined something radical: a universal machine—a computer that, if given the right instructions, could perform any calculation.

It wasn’t just a clever idea; it was the blueprint for modern computing. Every server farm, every neural network, every chatbot today stands on that silent foundation. Without Turing’s thought experiment, there would be no modern code to write, no silicon to spark intelligence.

Fun Fact about Turing:

During World War II, Alan Turing built an electromechanical machine called the Bombe (as seen in the picture, the crazy looking machine) to crack the German Enigma code. Historians estimate his work shortened the war by at least two years and saved around 14 million lives.

Even cooler? The Enigma machine had 159 quintillion possible settings so if you tried one per second it would still take millions of years to brute-force. Turing’s genius math turned that impossible task into a daily routine.

🧠Part 2 – The Father: John McCarthy

Two decades later, computer scientist John McCarthy turned theory into a movement. In 1956, he gathered a small group of dreamers at Dartmouth College and gave this field a name: "Artificial Intelligence" Duhh. By naming it, he created it. McCarthy’s leap transformed Turing’s quiet thought into a discipline that invited researchers, engineers, and eventually entrepreneurs to join a brand-new frontier.

Fast-forward to today:

AI agents that automate & enhance our tasks like SWOP, HappyRobot, Artisan or Unify, the image generators flooding my Instagram feed like Nano banana or Ideogram, the vibe coding co-pilot LLM's that write code such as Lovable, Orchids and Replit, or the AI tutors like Fluently: AI English tutor all of them trace a direct lineage back to Turing’s universal machine and McCarthy’s defining moment.

Every headline about the “AI revolution, AI hype” is really just the latest chapter in a story that began with one man’s quiet idea and another’s bold naming of a discipline. Without them our foundational model of AI wouldn't be.