History of AI
Explained in a timeline
Earliest Examples Of AI
Myths And Legends
AI shows up in lots of very early writings and stories. One of the earliest examples is ~3000 years ago in the story Homer’s Golden Maidens the maidens had abilities similar to human thought and were built out of gold by the Greek god of fire and blacksmithing. This is far from the only example where Artificial life appeared in ancient stories and legends. Perhaps more popular the giant robot Talos guarded Crete, an island near Greece.
First Theories
Ancient Greek Theories
There are examples of AI discussed by great philosophers like Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates. Popular theories and ideas, compared inanimate objects to human intelligence and claimed there were different levels each with their levels of intelligence. It was debated profusely what kind of intelligence the machine has, but a conclusion was never made. Plato accepted that knowledge was gained through reason and contemplation and therefore thought that AI would potentially be able to know everything but possibly not understand it in a human capacity
First Experiments
The Turing Test
The Turing Test was an experiment focused on debating and determining intelligence that machine introduced a practical test involving 3 people, a computer, a human interrogator, and a human foil. The situation is also sometimes referred to as an “imitation game” as the goal for both the machine and human is to convince the interrogator that they are human. The situation is set up with a robot designed to replicate human speech and a real person in a conversation and its the human interrogator whos job is too determine which is which.
First ‘AI's’
Earliest demonstration of AI
In 1943 Walter Pitts and Warren McCullough demonstrated a series of artificial neural networks and showed how they may be able to perform basic Logical functions in an article that determined potential ai implications by showing the first mathematical model of an artificial neural network. This experiment was the first instance that showed the capabilities of an artificial brain and paved the future for artificial intelligence.
AI's First Capabilities
Early Qualifications
AI’s earliest qualification was for playing games like checkers. Around 1954, AI started to thrive, helping computers improve and making them faster, cheaper, and more accessible. Progress was relatively quick taking only 7 years before AI was able to play a complete game of chess in 1957. In the early 1960s, an early “pre-robot” known as the John Hopskin Beast was a cylinder robot with “rudimentary intelligence” and was able to identify outlets on the wall and charge itself, essentially “surviving”. It wasn't until the late 1980s that AI had surpassed most humans' ability to play chess but it wasn't until nearly the 2000s when the AI Deepblue beat chess grandmaster and widely considered best chess player at the time Gary Kasparov.
Modern AI
Current AI
AI is currently considered “Narrow AI” which means it can perform basic tasks that require basic intelligence like, speech recognition, and machine learning. Despite being so early on, on its journey AI at its current level is dangerous and comes with lots of ethical challenges, for example, deep fakes (AI video/audio generators being misused to impersonate someone) are worrying people for the future as theirs already examples daily of flawless deep fakes confusing thousands if not millions. AI has also started replacing jobs putting an estimated 300 million jobs at risk by 2030. The main jobs that AI is replacing are Supply Chain optimization, and Data Analysis, Legal research as well as predictive maintenance.
