From Dartmouth to Now: Headlines from AI History that Set the Stage for Today

Welcome from the Regional Perspectives on AI Symposium Organizing Committee. Before the day turns to practical questions, how AI is reshaping teaching, research, and administrative work across our campuses, we want to pause and take stock of how we got here. This opening session walks through ten headline-making moments in AI history, from the field’s founding claims at the 1956 Dartmouth workshop to today’s generative AI boom, pairing each milestone with a short reflection on what it tells us about the choices in front of higher education now. This isn’t a comprehensive timeline; it’s a shared vocabulary-building exercise, a chance to level-set a room with very different degrees of AI familiarity and to surface the patterns — hype cycles, labor anxieties, questions of trust and authorship — that connect decades-old debates to this year’s conversations. Attendees will leave with a common frame of reference for the sessions that follow, and a sense that this year’s AI moment is one chapter in a much longer story than the news cycle usually suggests.