With the current buzz around artificial intelligence (AI), it would be easy to assume that it is a recent innovation. In fact, AI has been around in one form or another for more than 70 years. To understand the current generation of AI tools and where they might lead, it is helpful to understand how we got here.
Each generation of AI tools can be seen as an improvement on those that went before, but none of the tools are headed toward consciousness.
The mathematician and computing pioneer Alan Turing published an article in 1950 with the opening sentence: “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’”. He goes on to propose something called the imitation game, now commonly called the Turing test, in which a machine is considered intelligent if it cannot be distinguished from a human in a blind conversation.
Five years later, came the first published use of the phrase “artificial intelligence” in a proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence.
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