History and Evolution of Artificial Intelligence

History and Evolution of Artificial Intelligence

In simple words, Artificial intelligence is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines especially intelligent computer programs. The ultimate goal of Artificial intelligence is "The general intelligence" in a way that we could be even fooled by it.

In today's era of Artificial Intelligence, the words of the Computer scientist 'Edger Dijkstra' hold true.

The question whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

The idea of Artificial Intelligence is believed to be born back in 1940s and 1950s when some scientists came up with the idea of creating artificial brain. Since then, there is no turning back.

Turing test(1950s)

  • Turing test is a very famous and the very first one performed by a British computer scientist Alan Turing. In this test, Turing tried to replace a machine with a human in a conversation over a teleprinter and checked whether a computer can replace human with a significant level of intelligence.
  • He published his research in the famous landmark paper "Computing Machinery and intelligence" in 1950s.

ELIZA(1960s)

  • ELIZA was a chatterbot created by Joseph Weizenbaum which is believed to have been one of the first programs to pass Turing test.
  • It managed to mislead many people by mimicking the role of a therapist. It encouraged the people to speak more by cross questioning them.

IBM's Deep Blue

In 1997, AI achieved a remarkable goal when the world chess champion and grand master Gary Kasparov was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue, a chess playing computer program.

Kismet(1990s)

Kismet is a robot made in late 1990s. This robot had the capability to recognize and simulate facial expressions. It responded by making different facial expression like those of happiness, excitement, sorrow and so on for different scenarios.

Sony's AIBO(1999)

  • AIBO(The Artificial Intelligence robot) was a robotic dog created by Sony in 1999 originally for entertainment purposes.
  • This Robotic dog, AIBO has the capability to develop its own personality over time. It also has face recognition capability which helps it to detect different members of your family.

ASIMO(2000)

  • ASIMO(Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility) is a humanoid robot which was designed by Honda in 2000. ASIMO has the capability to recognize and simulate the surrounding environment such as recognition of moving objects, postures, sounds and faces,etc.
  • It is basically designed to help people. It can even recognize when a person offers it a handshake or calls it by the name.

Siri(2011)

  • Siri was the first digital virtual assistant designed originally by SRI International and is widely used in iOS, macOS, iPadOS and watchOS.
  • Siri has many amazing features like scheduling events and reminders, Navigation, device settings, Phone and text actions, handle payments through Apple Pay and much more.

Google DeepMind's AlphaGo(2016)

In 2016, Google DeepMind's AlphaGo defeated a professional Korean 'Go champion' who won 27 major tournaments from 2002 to 2016.

Microsoft's Cortana and Amazon's Alexa

  • The era of virtual assistants started with the release of Apple's Siri. Since then, many developments were made in this field. Alexa, a virtual assistant by Amazon, first came into existence in November,2014 whereas Microsoft announced the availability of Cortana for Windows 10 desktops and mobile devices in January,2015.
  • In today's times, these virtual assistants are capable of performing so many daily based tasks with a remarkable level of efficiency

Envisioning AI in next 20 years

The world today is filled with artificial intelligence all around it. Here, I want quoth the words of a renowned scientist Stephen Hawking

I think the development of full Artificial Intelligence could spell the end of human race.

It is believed that in the coming future, there would be hardly anything that the artificial intelligence will not be able to perform and it is predicted that AI will be a crucial part of every single domain of life.

Some of the predicted developments in AI in the coming future are:

  • In business world, almost 70% to 90% of all initial customer interactions will be likely to be conducted through AI.
  • Autonomous vehicles will start appearing in many cities across the globe(as predicted in some of the researches).
  • The emergence of self-aware and self-replicating software systems and robots are likely to emerge.
  • Our intelligent virtual assistants would be managing and affecting large parts of our lives from setting our daily goals to organizing our business meets.
  • Globally approved smart crypto tokens might start getting acceptance as we edge towards a single global medium of exchange.