Artificial Intelligence has been studied for decades and is still one of the most elusive subjects in Computer Science, and nowadays in politics and society. This partly because of how large and potent the subject is, potent to do good but yet potent to do badly. AI ranges from machines that can think independently of thinking to algorithms used to play board games. It has applications in nearly every way we use computers in society.
The term artificial intelligence was first mentioned by John McCarthy in 1956 when he held the first academic conference on the subject. But the journey to understand if machines can truly think began much before that. In Vannevar Bush’s seminal work As We May Think he proposed a system which amplifies people’s own knowledge and understanding. Alan Turing gave his own input by writing a paper on the notion of machines being able to simulate human beings and the ability to do intelligent things, such as play Chess. And from those days to now, one can refute a computer’s ability to process logic. But some do debate whether if a machine can think. For example, there is the so-called ‘Chinese room’ argument. Imagine someone is locked in a room, where they were passed notes in Chinese. Using an entire library of rules and look-up tables they would be able to produce valid responses in Chinese, but would they really ‘understand’ the language? The argument is that computers can apply logic to fulfill objective but without really understanding the activity of its purpose, which is in essence of what we know as “thinking”
Themes of AI
What most people think of as ‘true AI’ hasn’t experienced rapid progress over the decades. Significant AI breakthroughs have been promised for the past 60 years, but nothing close to those situations that come close to the movies that have scared us so much and make us skeptical about AI. Rather than that, the main advances have been advances in search algorithms, machine learning algorithms, and integrating statistical analysis into understanding the world at large, what is largely used in examining purchase histories and developing marketing strategies and decisions.
In the field of AI expectations seem to always outpace the reality. After decades of research, no computer has come close to passing the Turing Test (a model for measuring ‘intelligence’) which is ultimately what determines the how transcendental and dangerous is a AI. The logical power of systems have grown but have not become as common as human experts. And while we’ve built software that can beat humans at some games, open ended games that require maliciousness, team work and hunches are still far from the mastery of computers. For now, we are focusing more on what can sell or attract media and people, or on what makes cyclical processes and patterns more quick and easy, but not on what may be powerful enough to… We will see it next week.