That's not really machine learning though. If you wanted to go way back, AI research goes back to implementations of hebbian learning in computer science back in the 1950s as a way of emulating human neurons. I was merely pointing out that AI was a computer science "dead end" until restricted Boltzmann machines were revisited by Hinton et al back in 2008 or so, and that 99% of the growth in the field has happened since the early 2010s when we reached a turning point where deep learning models could actually outperform classical statistical models like regression and random forests