What is artificial intelligence?

Artificial intelligence is a specialty within computer science that is concerned with creating systems that
can replicate human intelligence and problem-solving abilities. They do this by taking in a myriad of data,
processing it, and learning from their past in order to streamline and improve in the future. A normal
computer program would need human interference in order to fix bugs and improve processes.

PAST

The history of artificial intelligence:

The idea of “artificial intelligence” goes back thousands of years, to ancient philosophers considering
questions of life and death. In ancient times, inventors made things called “automatons” which were
mechanical and moved independently of human intervention. The word “automaton” comes from
ancient Greek, and means “acting of one’s own will.” One of the earliest records of an automaton
comes from 400 BCE and refers to a mechanical pigeon created by a friend of the philosopher Plato.
Many years later, one of the most famous automatons was created by Leonardo da Vinci around the
year 1495.

So while the idea of a machine being able to function on its own is ancient, for the purposes of this
article, we’re going to focus on the 20th century, when engineers and scientists began to make strides
toward our modern-day AI.

Groundwork for AI:

1900-1950In the early 1900s, there was a lot of media created that centered around the idea of artificial
humans. So much so that scientists of all sorts started asking the question: is it possible to create an
artificial brain? Some creators even made some versions of what we now call “robots” (and the word
was coined in a Czech play in 1921) though most of them were relatively simple. These were steam-
powered for the most part, and some could make facial expressions and even walk.

Dates of note:

• 1921: Czech playwright Karel Čapek released a science fiction play “Rossum’s Universal Robots”
which introduced the idea of “artificial people” which he named robots. This was the first known
use of the word.

• 1929: Japanese professor Makoto Nishimura built the first Japanese robot, named Gakutensoku.

• 1949: Computer scientist Edmund Callis Berkley published the book “Giant Brains, or Machines
that Think” which compared the newer models of computers to human brains.
Birth of AI: 1950-1956

This range of time was when the interest in AI really came to a head. Alan Turing published his work
“Computer Machinery and Intelligence” which eventually became The Turing Test, which experts used to
measure computer intelligence. The term “artificial intelligence” was coined and came into popular use.

Dates of note:

• 1950: Alan Turing published “Computer Machinery and Intelligence” which proposed a test of
machine intelligence called The Imitation Game.

• 1952: A computer scientist named Arthur Samuel developed a program to play checkers, which
is the first to ever learn the game independently.

• 1955: John McCarthy held a workshop at Dartmouth on “artificial intelligence” which is the first
use of the word, and how it came into popular usage.

AI maturation: 1957-1979

The time between when the phrase “artificial intelligence” was created, and the 1980s was a period of
both rapid growth and struggle for AI research. The late 1950s through the 1960s was a time of creation.
From programming languages that are still in use to this day to books and films that explored the idea of
robots, AI became a mainstream idea quickly.

The 1970s showed similar improvements, such as the first anthropomorphic robot being built in Japan,
to the first example of an autonomous vehicle being built by an engineering grad student. However, it
was also a time of struggle for AI research, as the U.S. government showed little interest in continuing to
fund AI research.

Notable dates include:

• 1958: John McCarthy created LISP (acronym for List Processing), the first programming language
for AI research, which is still in popular use to this day.

• 1959: Arthur Samuel created the term “machine learning” when doing a speech about teaching
machines to play chess better than the humans who programmed them.

• 1961: The first industrial robot Unimate started working on an assembly line at General Motors
in New Jersey, tasked with transporting die casings and welding parts on cars (which was
deemed too dangerous for humans).

• 1965: Edward Feigenbaum and Joshua Lederberg created the first “expert system” which was a
form of AI programmed to replicate the thinking and decision-making abilities of human experts.

• 1966: Joseph Weizenbaum created the first “chatterbot” (later shortened to chatbot), ELIZA, a
mock psychotherapist, that used natural language processing (NLP) to converse with
 humans.1968: Soviet mathematician Alexey Ivakhnenko published “Group Method of Data
Handling” in the journal “Avtomatika,” which proposed a new approach to AI that would later
become what we now know as “Deep Learning.”

• 1973: An applied mathematician named James Lighthill gave a report to the British Science
Council, underlining that strides were not as impressive as those that had been promised by
scientists, which led to much-reduced support and funding for AI research from the British
government.

• 1979: James L. Adams created The Standford Cart in 1961, which became one of the first
examples of an autonomous vehicle. In ‘79, it successfully navigated a room full of chairs without
human interference.

• 1979: The American Association of Artificial Intelligence which is now known as the Association
for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) was founded.

Artificial General Intelligence: 2012-present

That brings us to the most recent developments in AI, up to the present day. We’ve seen a surge in
common-use AI tools, such as virtual assistants, search engines, etc. This time period also popularized
Deep Learning and Big Data..

Notable dates include:

• 2012: Two researchers from Google (Jeff Dean and Andrew Ng) trained a neural network to
recognize cats by showing it unlabeled images and no background information.

• 2015: Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Steve Wozniak (and over 3,000 others) signed an open
letter to the worlds’ government systems banning the development of (and later, use of)
autonomous weapons for purposes of war.

• 2016: Hanson Robotics created a humanoid robot named Sophia, who became known as the
first “robot citizen” and was the first robot created with a realistic human appearance and the
ability to see and replicate emotions, as well as to communicate.

• 2017: Facebook programmed two AI chatbots to converse and learn how to negotiate, but as
they went back and forth they ended up forgoing English and developing their own language,
completely autonomously.

• 2018: A Chinese tech group called Alibaba’s language-processing AI beat human intellect on a
Stanford reading and comprehension test.

• 2019: Google’s AlphaStar reached Grandmaster on the video game StarCraft 2, outperforming all
but .2% of human players.

• 2020: OpenAI started beta testing GPT-3, a model that uses Deep Learning to create code,
poetry, and other such language and writing tasks. While not the first of its kind, it is the first
that creates content almost indistinguishable from those created by humans.
• 2021: OpenAI developed DALL-E, which can process and understand images enough to produce
accurate captions, moving AI one step closer to understanding the visual world.

COMPARING THE PAST, PRESENT, and FUTURE

ASPECT PAST PRESENT FUTURE

FOCUS PROBLEM-SOLVING MACHINE LEARNING GENERAL AI
APPLICATION GAMES, RULE-BASED HEALTHCARE, GLOBAL PROBLEM
AI AUTOMATION SOLVING
CHALLENGES LIMITED RESOURCES ETHICAL CONCERNS SUSTAINABILITY