History of artificial intelligence

The history of artificial intelligence (AI) began in antiquity, with myths, stories, and rumors of artificial beings endowed with intelligence by master craftsmen. The field of AI research was founded at a workshop held on the campus of Dartmouth College in 1956. At the workshop, a concept of the first AI program, Logic Theorist, was presented by future Turing Awardee Allen Newell and future Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon, with help from J. C. Shaw. The software architecture of this program differed from modern AI systems in that it was a hand-written fixed script. Attendees of the workshop became the leaders of AI research for decades. Many of them predicted that machines as intelligent as humans would exist within a generation. Despite the eventual success of its attendees and the field as a whole, the workshop was considered a failure. "When the workshop failed to deliver, AI was dismissed as a pipe dream and research funding dried up". It became apparent that researchers had underestimated the complexity of this objective. In 1974, criticism from James Lighthill and pressure from the U.S. Congress led the U.S. and British Governments to stop funding undirected research into artificial intelligence. Seven years later, a visionary initiative by the Japanese Government and the success of expert systems reinvigorated investment in AI, and by the late 1980s, the industry had grown into a billion-dollar enterprise. However, investors' enthusiasm waned in the 1990s, and the field was criticized in the press and avoided by industry (a period known as an "AI winter"). Nevertheless, research and funding continued to grow under other names. In the early 2000s, machine learning was applied to a wide range of problems in academia and industry. The success was attributable to the availability of powerful computer hardware, the accumulation of expansive data sets, and the application of rigorous mathematical methods. Soon after, deep learning proved to be a breakthrough technology, eclipsing all other methods. The transformer architecture, introduced in 2017, and was utilized to produce generative AI applications, among other implementation. Investment in AI boomed in the 2020s. The AI boom, initiated by the development of transformer architecture, led to the rapid scaling and public releases of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude (AI). These models exhibit human-like traits of knowledge, attention, and creativity, and have been integrated into various sectors, fueling exponential investment in AI. However, concerns about the potential risks and ethical implications of advanced AI have also emerged, causing debate about the future of AI and its impact on society.

Precursors

Myth, folklore, fiction and speculation

Mechanical men and artificial beings appear in Greek myths, such as the golden robots of Hephaestus, the bronze giant Talos and Pygmalion's Galatea. In the Middle Ages, there were rumors of secret mystical or alchemical means of placing mind into matter, such as Jabir ibn Hayyan's Takwin, Paracelsus' homunculus, Rabbi Judah Loew's Golem and Roger Bacon's brazen head. By the 19th century, ideas about artificial men and thinking machines became a popular theme in fiction. Notable works include Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's, Faust, Part Two (1832), and Karel Čapek's R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) (1921). Stories of these creatures and their fates consider many of the same hopes, fears and ethical concerns that are presented by modern artificial intelligence. Issues relevant to AI were also discussed in speculative essays such as Samuel Butler's "Darwin among the Machines" (1863).

Automata

Realistic humanoid automata were built by craftsmen from many civilizations, including Yan Shi, Hero of Alexandria, Al-Jazari, Haroun al-Rashid, Jacques de Vaucanson, Leonardo Torres y Quevedo, Pierre Jaquet-Droz and Wolfgang von Kempelen. The oldest known automata were sacred statues of ancient Egypt and Greece. The faithful believed that craftsman had imbued these figures with very real minds, capable of wisdom and emotion—Hermes Trismegistus wrote that "by discovering the true nature of the gods, man has been able to reproduce it".

Formal reasoning

Artificial intelligence is based on the assumption that the process of human thought can be mechanized. Chinese, Indian and Greek philosophers developed structured methods of formal reasoning by the first millennium BCE. Formal logic was invented and improved by Greek, Islamic and European philosophers, such as Aristotle, Euclid, Al-Khwarizmi, Duns Scotus and René Descartes. Spanish philosopher Ramon Llull (1232–1315) developed several logical machines devoted to the production of knowledge by logical means; Llull described his machines as mechanical entities that could combine basic and undeniable truths by simple logical operations, produced by the machine by mechanical meanings, in such ways as to produce all the possible knowledge. Llull's work had a great influence on Gottfried Leibniz, who redeveloped his ideas.

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