AI Has Jersey roots
By: William Thompson, NJ Realtors® Director of Technology
If you’ve felt like your world has been flipped upside down over the past couple of years as artificial intelligence has burst onto the scene, you’re certainly not alone. To most of us, it seems like AI materialized out of thin air, instantly transformed from a sci-fi concept into an everyday tool we use to draft listing descriptions, brainstorm social media content, and create checklists. However, as we look back through a historical lens, the truth is, AI is not a modern overnight success story but a decades-long evolution of multiple technologies coming together. A surprising amount of its foundational history was written right here in the Garden State.
THE MOUSE THAT SOLVED THE MAZE
Long before computers could turn you into an action figure or serenade you with a personalized rock anthem, scientists were trying to answer a deceptively simple question: Can machines think? In 1950, British mathematician Alan Turing, who earned his doctoral degree from Princeton University, published a paper introducing what we now call the Turing Test, which established a benchmark for judging whether a machine could exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from a human. In the same year, right here in Murray Hill, Claude Shannon, a Bell Labs scientist, created a robotic mazesolving mouse known as Theseus. Equipped with a series of electronic relays, Theseus was designed to navigate a metal maze, locate a brass “cheese” target, and remember mistakes it made along the way. This is widely recognized as one of the earliest examples of machine learning. Shannon later joined John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, and Nathaniel Rochester as one of the organizers behind the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project, the gathering widely credited with launching artificial intelligence as a formal field of study.
WHEN COMPUTERS LEARNED TO READ
Following the initial excitement of the 1950s and 60s, AI hit its first major slowdown when funding tightened, and technology struggled to live up to some of the era’s boldest promises. In the late 1980s, the technological thaw had begun, and one clear example came from AT&T Bell Labs in Holmdel, where a researcher named Yann LeCun developed a breakthrough using a convolutional neural network, or CNN. Inspired by how the biological visual cortex processes information, LeCun built and trained a system to recognize handwritten characters. This foundational technology helped teach computers to read handwritten ZIP codes for the U.S. Postal Service and later supported systems used to read dollar amounts on bank checks. Every time an AI tool recognizes text in an image, reads handwriting, or interprets visual information, you’re seeing the legacy of work that took a major leap forward in a Monmouth County lab more than thirty years ago.
AI IN PLAIN SIGHT
By the time the 2000s arrived, artificial intelligence had stopped being an experimental proof of concept and had slipped into our daily lives without us even knowing. Personal computers, online platforms, and connected devices have become so integrated into our daily lives that many of us can’t remember a time before them. Think about the early Automated Valuation Models, designed to estimate property values using hundreds or thousands of data points. Consider the smart home craze of the 2010s, like the smart thermostat, which actively learns homeowners’ daily routines to shave money off monthly utility bills. We didn’t call it AI back then; we just called it software. These platforms didn’t use conversational language to generate text for us, but they relied on the same machine learning principles established decades earlier. They worked quietly in the background, analyzing massive amounts of data to turn raw numbers into actionable business insights.
ANOTHER TOOL IN THE TOOLBOX
Tools like ChatGPT are not magical entities that appeared out of nowhere to disrupt your livelihood. They represent just the latest iteration of a continuous, seventy-year technological evolution that New Jersey minds helped build from the ground up. Just like carbon paper, e-signature platforms, and cloud storage solutions, modern AI is another tool designed to create efficiency. It excels at automating the routine, repetitive behind-the-scenes tasks like drafting outlines, analyzing data, and jumpstarting creative projects so you can focus on the one thing technology can never replicate: human relationships.