Section 1

Evolution of Artificial Intelligence

The handbook's first five chapters follow machine intelligence from Pascal's adding machine to the coding agents of 2026 and assume no background in AI. They show how reasoning became computation, what counts as an AI system under research, standards and legal definitions, how to test labels such as narrow, general and agentic, why AI's booms turned into winters, and when a decision belongs to hand-written rules, a learned model or a person. All five chapters are Beginner and work documented cases with real numbers, from the 2025 Turing test and the Air Canada chatbot ruling to XCON's 6,200 rules and Australia's Robodebt scheme.