Artificial Intelligence (AI) has both a relevant recent history and an interesting backstory. Myths about humanoid assistants and protectors have been known since ancient times, but only in the middle of the 20th century did the practical possibility of creating Weak AI technologies emerge, allowing one to automate the routine component of mental work and thus revolutionize many areas of human activity. However, even in our time, a sacred attitude towards Strong AI remains, a belief in its power and in the threats to civilization from AI. The book does not cover anything related to Strong AI, and its content is limited to the history of the research and development that led to the creation of Weak AI. Particular attention is paid to two approaches - symbolic, a thing of the past, and connectionist, which has become the basis of artificial neural networks and machine learning, as well as such current applications as robotics, computer vision and working with texts in natural language.