The Quest for Artificial Intelligence

A comprehensive technical history of artificial intelligence written from the inside by a Stanford pioneer who was there from the 1960s onward. Nilsson covers the full arc — from early cybernetics and logic through search, knowledge representation, machine learning, and robotics — with the rigour of someone who contributed to the foundational work. Unlike journalistic histories, this book explains the ideas themselves, not just the personalities. The full text is freely available on Nilsson's Stanford page, making it an unusually accessible primary source. For anyone who wants to understand AI's recurring patterns of promise and disappointment through the actual technical choices that were made, this is the reference.