Margaret Masterman and the Invention of A.I.

The untold story of the woman who invented Artificial Intelligence.

‘Put it on my tomb: “This is what she was trying for.”’

Sixty-five years ago, a middle-aged woman working with a small group of collaborators out of a converted shed on the outskirts of Cambridge predicted the future of Artificial Intelligence. Her story has been unknown and her work destroyed or forgotten – until now.

Beginning with an extraordinary discovery in the archives of the women’s college she helped found, Peter de Bolla pieces together the story of Margaret Masterman and the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU).

As world powers raced to discover and exploit the capabilities of the first computers during the Cold War, Masterman emerged from obscurity to become an unlikely prophet of artificial intelligence. Misunderstood, deplatformed and ultimately erased from history, Masterman and the CLRU not only cracked the problem of machine translation (MT), but accurately theorised how the ‘electronic brain’ might work – guided by Masterman’s vision of a computer that would be more than a machine, but a companion to human minds: A machine with which to do philosophy.

This is the unknown story of a woman nobody wanted to listen to, but whose uncredited work would shape our contemporary world.