ABSTRACT
Some notion of GeoAI has been around for thousands of years, as expressed in the ancient Greek myth of the giant Talos and his many artificial contemporaries. Similar myths in other ancient societies suggest that the notion of artificial intelligence seems to be engrained in the minds of the human species. Moving closer to the present, and starting around the time of Turing's founding of the discipline, this chapter first provides a brief overview of developments in AI over the past seventy years. Two meanings of AI in geography are distinguished: a general sense and a specialized sense, whereby the latter is more specifically geographic. Eschewing predictions, I then discuss four versions (or ‘flavors’) of AI in general and GeoAI in particular: Program, Neural Nets, Speculations, and Being Human. These are partly sequential, but they may also merge or at least co-exist. A broader notion of ‘intelligence’ is also considered, leading to immature speculations about potential novel kinds of AI.
