How ideas became machines
From Faust to Frankenschein to ChatGPT: a brief history of artificial intelligence

Broadcast: 22 December 2025, 8:15 p.m.
Updated: 22 December 2025, 9:16 p.m.
Contributors: Michael Wildenhain, Phillipp Krüger, and Marcel Schütz

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• An inspiring historical walk between fact and fiction

• Literary-artistic and technological paths of AI up to the present day

• Texts, minds (and spirits), programs – an unconventional approach

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In this episode of KInote, the focus is on Michael Wildenhain’s book A Short History of AI—and thus on the content of a narrative that approaches artificial intelligence from its historical models and trajectories. Is artificial intelligence becoming more similar to humans—or even superior to them? Fascination with and fear of automata, robots, and artificial intelligence have accompanied humanity for a long time. The award-winning author Michael Wildenhain traces this history in exemplary fashion and explores the question of whether AI could one day be more than a technical tool—and whether it might even develop its own consciousness.

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At the latest with the emergence of ChatGPT in November 2022, the debate has gained new intensity. Using key historical milestones, Wildenhain describes the development and interpretation of AI: from literary predecessors such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to early programming pioneers Herbert A. Simon, Allen Newell, and Alan Turing, and on to philosophical interpreters such as Gottlob Frege and John Rogers Searle. In this way, a dense narrative of AI emerges that interweaves the history of technology, ideas, and culture. Wildenhain discusses in depth in what sense AI systems—measured against human standards—can be considered intelligent, where their limits lie, and whether increasing complexity could indeed lead to an independent consciousness that might one day even surpass humans.

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A brief journey through the short history of AI is undertaken together with the author at the microphone by Phillipp Krüger and Marcel Schütz from KIWIT.

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The current podcast episode with Michael Wildenhain is available on YouTube and Spotify.