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Asked by anon-379416 on 18 Jan 2024.
Question: why did people make ai
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Andrew Maynard answered on 18 Jan 2024:
Really good question! I think one answer is simply because they could! Don’t you think it’s interesting to ask if we could make a machine that thinks like a human?
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Demetris Soukeras answered on 18 Jan 2024:
What a great question.
I think people made and improved AI for different reasons.
The first person I know of who properly investigated machine intelligence was Alan Turing (the one who broke the Enigma code!), I think he was mostly motivated by finding the idea interesting and a sense of intellectual adventure.
I think most interesting research and inventions start this way, someone playing with an idea because they enjoy discovering something new.
Later on people improved and made AI because they saw it being useful, and as computers got better you could make more complicated and interesting AI.
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Kevin Tsang answered on 19 Jan 2024:
Very interesting question. I would guess it is partly a development of computer science and partly because humans are fascinated by intelligence and our uniqueness in this universe. More practically, it can now support us in many ways.
I develop machine learning algorithms for both those reasons, because I think it can help people and because it is very interesting to be able to do so.
A question for you to think about: if you had all the knowledge and tools to make an AI of your choice, why would you make an AI, and what would it do?
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Carl Peter Robinson answered on 22 Jan 2024: last edited 3 Feb 2024 10:21 am
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 quote, “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 AI was made 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.
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