Dreams, Machines and Quantum Beginnings. The Quantum Convergence, #1

Before the robots and the qubits, there were three thousand years of people dreaming about thinking machines. Talos, the bronze giant who patrolled the shores of Crete. Yan Shi's mechanical man was presented to a Chinese king around 1000 BC. Al-Jazari's programmable automata at the Artuqid court. The urge to build a mind is older than most of what we call history, and it keeps coming back. This is the origin story of the convergence now reshaping the world.
From the Antikythera mechanism to Babbage and Lovelace. From Bletchley Park and the code-breaking Colossus to the women who programmed ENIAC. From the first neural network to AlphaFold and the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. From Planck's reluctant quantum to Google's Willow processor crossing the error-correction threshold in December 2024, a goal the field chased for thirty years. Gari Johnson traces how we got here without the mysticism and without the cheerleading.
He is careful about who invented what, generous to the hidden pioneers written out of the usual story (Chien-Shiung Wu, Mary Tsingou, Shirley Ann Jackson), and honest about what 2025 actually looks like against what the marketing implies. The through-line is simple. Artificial intelligence, robotics, and quantum computing did not appear out of nowhere. They are the meeting point of separate histories that have been converging for centuries.
Understanding the road in and the road ahead makes far more sense. Book 1 of The Quantum Convergence. A complete read on its own, and the foundation for everything that follows.