How to Learn Any "New" Technological Concepts Quickly (take AI for example)

[Chip (OP)]

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Through trial and errror, I learned that the best way to understand technology is to "evolve with it"; find where the Timeline begins, as some history always helps ! Trust me, there is no better way, and combining it with nomenclature and my fave, etymology -- (when the subject matter is really 'foreign' !):

Me: "Would you say that an early AI app was OCR (Optical Character Recognition)  ?"

Claude.ai: "Yes, OCR is a legitimate early AI application, with a caveat about what "AI" meant at the time.

It is pattern recognition, which was a core AI research problem from the 1950s on. Early OCR was template matching and feature extraction, not learning. Reading machines like Kurzweil's (1976) and the bank cheque readers (MICR/OCR-A fonts, 1960s) were deployed AI in the sense that they did something previously needing human perception. Later OCR moved to trained classifiers, and LeCun's neural net for ZIP code digits at AT&T/USPS around 1989 is the clear machine-learning milestone.

Another pattern holds as well, the "AI effect": once a task works reliably, people stop calling it AI. OCR is the classic example, along with spell checkers and speech dictation.

Earlier candidates exist if you want to push further back: Samuel's checkers program (1952), Logic Theorist (1956), and the perceptron (1958), which was itself built for visual character recognition"