[cartoonfoxes]

Early history of artificial intelligence research, maybe MIT CSAIL specifically? https://projects.csail.mit.edu/films/aifilms/AIFilms.html

There were a few decades of research into symbolic AI and expert systems - "Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence" before the modern deep-learning revolution. Lots of promise, interesting research, and very cool (and esoteric) hardware came out of it, which never found wide application outside the lab. You could pitch it as a sort of analogue to Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006).