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Asked by anon-379416 on 19 Jan 2024.
Question: How did people come up with the idea of AI?
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Demetris Soukeras answered on 19 Jan 2024:
In terms of the idea I think humans have always been interested in whether a machine could think. There’s an ancient Greek myth about a thinking bronze statue called Talos who protected the island of Crete from pirates and invaders.
The tricky part is how to actually do it, and that took a great many mathematicians, scientists and engineers many years to work out.
To be a little less handwavy, I think it started from the mathematics, where humans tried to refine human thinking and logic as a series of symbols, so 1 + 1 = 2.
When computers were invented they fundamentally worked with a mathematical logic:
Information -> (binary, 0100100001101001)
maths logic ->(AND, OR, NOT).All the clever things they do can be boiled down to a few simple maths equations that are computed really fast many times.
Some researchers were interested in what other “thinking” can be done on computers and worked very hard on what combination of mathematical logic and information can come together and make something that can think.Each generation of researchers discovering a little more, solving problems and passing them on to the next generation. So its a collaborative effort and like most great inventions no one person came up with it.
But even now the fundamental basis that AI is based on is representing relationships, problems, ideas and thinking with mathematics. As it is the language that computers speak.
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Carl Peter Robinson answered on 22 Jan 2024:
I’m using part of an answer I’ve already given on this forum because I think it’s very relevant to this question:
I think it was just a natural progression of the humans’ curiosity about the world, how it works, and how to create things, either to mimic or replicate existing structures in nature, or explore how new things could fit into our world. Logic, mathematics, science, and engineering have been going on for centuries, from the early Greeks like Aristotle, through to Leonardo Da Vinci, Newton, Leibniz, Gauss, Boole, and many others. If you throw in the subject of philosophy and its history (e.g., think of Descartes’ famous quite, “I think, therefore I am”) it becomes clear to see how a field such as artificial intelligence was always going to come about. Scientists, philosophers, and researchers in general, love to think, to explore new ideas, whether they are possible, and what possibilities they could create.
If we want to be more specific, we should consider the work of McCulloch and Pitts in the 1940s. They are generally credited with the first recognisable piece of research that could be deemed as AI. Although, I’m sure Alan Turing, and a lot of his current supporters, would argue his work in machine intelligence and computation lay the foundations for McCulloch and Pitts. I like to go with McCulloch and Pitts because they were doing research into modelling artificial neurons in a networked structure (what we could call a neural network). They were interested in whether it was possible to perform computations using a network structure and even suggested such networks could “learn”.
So, in this case, you could say that the idea of AI came about because researchers wanted to explore whether it was possible to replicate, very basically, some of the human brain’s functionality and prove that such an artificial system could perform logical computation.
Further, we should credit John McCarthy in the 1950s for coining the term, “Artificial Intelligence” and for hosting a workshop of this research area that got the exploration of AI going at pace for around two decades. The aim of this workshop was to produce proof that a machine, most probably a computer, was able to simulate aspects and features of human intelligence.
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