Today, artificial intelligence is on everyone's mind. Some experts are advising people to learn artificial intelligence, as they believe AI is the future. Others discuss the potential risks associated with AI. Artificial intelligence has disrupted the world's job market. AI is everywhere, from education to security and agriculture to transport. All the sectors are harping about AI. But is AI Aladin's Genie, who just appeared after rubbing the lamp? Or it has developed itself slowly. And now it has become giant. But how did this AI revolution start?
Contribution of Alan Turing
For that, we have to go back to the 1950s. During that time, computing machines were like big-sized calculators. Around the same time, a mathematician and computer scientist envisioned the possibility of artificial intelligence. At a time when computing heavily relied on human intelligence, British mathematician Alan Turing was attempting to create a machine that could exceed its programming limitations. Turing wanted to do a type of coding that could work according to the given program but should surpass its limited functionalities. In simple terms, he wanted to develop a computer that could start thinking like humans. For that purpose, Turing developed a machine, which he called the "imitation game". Although Turing was unable to create artificial intelligence with his machine, he successfully broke the Enigma code. Hitler's army used the Enigma code to transmit secret messages.
Founding Father of AI
In 1956, a professor from Dartmouth College, John McCarthy, organised a conference to brainstorm on the topic of whether humans can build thinking machines. Therefore, John McCarthy is called the founding father of artificial intelligence. McCarthy used the word artificial intelligence for the first time in this conference.
Eliza & Shakey
In the 1960s, MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum built Eliza, the world's first chatbot. This chatbot was so effective that people felt as if they were talking to a real human being. When the foundation stones of the Indian Space Program were being laid, the Stanford Research Initiative, Artificial Intelligence Centre, developed a robot called Shaky; at that time we were doing this. Shaky, the robot, had a sensor and camera installed. It was able to identify obstacles. Shaky was like a toy if we compare it with contemporary robots; however, it was able to visualise objects and manoeuvre the route.
AI Winter
The American Association of Artificial Intelligence formed in the 1980s to promote AI in the West. But in 1974 mathematician Sir James Lighthill published a critical analysis of ongoing AI research and reported that AI research is unable to generate substantial results. Hence, funding should be curtailed; therefore, the period from 1974 to 1990 is also known as AI winter.
However, private companies continued their research on AI. In 1986, Ernst Bickmanns invented the first unmanned vehicle. At the same time, IBM developed the DeepBlue program. The program was built to play chess. Deep Blue was able to defeat popular chess player Gary Kasparov in one out of six games.
Revival of AI Research
2000-2019 brought another revolution in the field of AI; Dr Cynthia Breazeal developed a social robot named 'Kismet'. Cynthia claimed that Kismet was able to copy human emotions and can very well express them. In 2011, IBM built another program called "Deep QA" to compete with the US quiz show Jeopardy. IBM fed DeepQA with encyclopaedia data and named it Watson. In 2011, Apple came up with its virtual assistant Siri; in competition, Amazon launched its own virtual assistant, Alexa. The fascinating TV show 'Person of Interest' made its debut in 2011. It was a story about a computer programmer, Harold Flinch, who develops a computer program. The AI collected information from all machines and cameras, sending it to the government to prevent terrorist attacks.
Neural Networks
In 2012, Geoffrey Hinton developed a program that he named 'neural networks'. Hinton designed the AI to mimic the structure of human brains. Hinton later called it deep learning. In 2023, Hinton suddenly resigned from Google because he realised that he had built something that was going to change mankind's history. Historian Yuval Noah Harari made a similar statement in his book.
Recent Developments
Conversely, Sam Altman was working on the development of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) at his AI research company, OpenAI. OpenAI built its first chatbot, ChatGPT, in the year 2022. OpenAI fed it with billions of data points. Immediately afterwards, Google launched BARD AI and later renamed it as Gemini AI. In 2025, China will also jump in this race with DeepSeek AI.
I can conclude with the statement from Dave Waters:
Artificial intelligence will digitally disrupt all industries. So don’t be left behind.
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