There was, and it came in the form of what are called “distributed representations.”58 The idea was to try to represent words by points in some kind of abstract “space,” in which related words appear “nearer” to one another. A number of techniques emerged over the 1990s and 2000s for doing this,59 but one in particular in the past decade has shown exceptional promise: neural networks.

Brian Christian, The Alignment Problem, loc. 65932