Technology and artificial intelligence

The History Hour

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History episodes. Our guest is Zoe Kleinman, the BBC's Technology Editor.

We start with the world's first general purpose electronic computer, the ENIAC, built in 1946 by a team of female mathematicians including Kathleen Kay McNulty.

Then we hear about the man who invented the original chatbot, called Eliza, but didn't believe computers could achieve intelligence.

Following that, Dr Hiromichi Fujisawa describes how his team at Waseda University in Japan developed the first humanoid robot in 1973, called WABOT-1.

Staying in Japan, the engineer Masahiro Hara explains how he was inspired to design the first QR code by his favourite board game.

Finally, Thérèse Izay Kirongozi recounts how the death of her brother drove her to build robots that manage traffic in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Contributors: Zoe Kleinman - BBC Technology Editor. Gini Mauchly Calcerano - daughter of Kathleen Kay McNulty, who developed ENIAC. Miriam Weizenbaum - daughter of Joseph Weizenbaum, who built Eliza chatbot. Dr Hiromichi Fujisawa - developer of WABOT-1 robot. Masahiro Hara - inventor of the QR code. Thérèse Izay Kirongozi - engineer behind traffic robots.

(Photo: Robots manage traffic in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. Credit: Federico Scoppa/AFP via Getty Images)