The science of AI has been around for decades and is all very real. Researchers believe there is a 50% chance of AI outperforming humans in all tasks in 45 years and of automating all human jobs in 120 years.
In the realm of AI, predicting our trajectory can be challenging. However, this research underscores the remarkable journey from mere AI concepts to their tangible impact on the workforce. Interestingly, our encounters with Artificial Intelligence often go unnoticed. As we grow accustomed to technology’s daily marvels, we seldom pause to ponder the scientific principles powering the gadgets and programs we utilize. For example, without Artificial Intelligence, there would be no ChatGPT, no virtual assistants, either on the web or on your smartphone, and there would have been no Teneo.ai either.
We are therefore forever grateful to the people who were the inspiration behind this amazing technology and who have helped make computer science so much more capable.
Where did the term “Artificial Intelligence” come from?
One of the greatest innovators in the field was John McCarthy, widely recognized as the father of Artificial Intelligence due to his astounding contribution in the field of Computer Science and AI.
It was in the mid-1950s that McCarthy coined the term “Artificial Intelligence” which he would define as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines”.
Who was John McCarthy?
Along with being considered the father of AI, John McCarthy was a prominent computer scientist and cognitive scientist.
McCarthy presented his definition of Artificial Intelligence at a conference on the campus of Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956 indicating the beginning of AI research, and the attendees, him included, became the leaders of AI research for many decades.
McCarthy is the creator of Lisp, a standard programming language widely employed in robotics, various scientific applications, and a host of Internet-based services, including credit-card fraud detection and airline scheduling.
Lisp held a special place among the original hackers, who used it in their attempts to coax the rudimentary IBM machines of the late 1950s into playing chess. This might explain why mastering Lisp commands such high regard in the programming community. The development of this system was crucial for McCarthy’s other significant contribution: the concept of computer time-sharing, or utility computing.
In a time when personal computers were a figment of science fiction, John envisioned a super central computer that could accommodate multiple simultaneous connections. This concept was a fundamental building block in the eventual creation of the Internet.
At Stanford University, McCarthy founded an AI laboratory where he worked on early versions of a self-driving car. He produced papers on robot consciousness and free will and worked on ways of making programs understand or mimic human common-sense decision-making more effectively.
Another major McCarthy innovation was an early system of computer time-sharing or networking, which allowed many people to share data by linking to a central computer, and in 1960, when he opined that “computation may someday be organized as a public utility” the underlying concept of cloud computing was stated.
From Chess to the Turing Test
In 1966, the pioneer of AI, John McCarthy, captured global attention by orchestrating a series of four concurrent computer chess matches against competitors in Russia, conducted via telegraph. These matches spanned several months, culminating in McCarthy losing two and drawing two. Although John McCarthy departed this world on October 24, 2011, his enduring legacy in the AI field continues to motivate and shape the work of researchers and innovators worldwide.
However, despite his efforts, this system did not help McCarthy to achieve his true objective: that a computer would pass the Turing test. In this test, a person asks questions via a computer screen. If they can’t determine whether the responses are coming from a human or a machine, then the machine is definitely intelligent. For now, no computer has achieved it. Near the end of the research stage of his career, in 1978, McCarthy had to give up on his purist idea of artificial intelligence:
To succeed, artificial intelligence needs 1.7 Einsteins, two Maxwells five Faradays and the funding of 0.3 Manhattan Projects,” he resignedly recognized.
John McCarthy
Other prominent leaders in Artificial Intelligence
John McCarthy belonged to a prestigious group of scientists who all in part were the fathers of artificial intelligence in one way or another. Most, but not all, of his peers also took part in the renowned Dartmouth Conference in 1956. We will look at some of the other key figures in AI.
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Alan Turing
Prior to the Dartmouth Conference, Turing was an English mathematician, computer scientist, cryptanalyst, logician and theoretical biologist who was influential in the development of theoretical computer science.
His Turing machine provided the concepts of algorithm and computation that led to general-purpose computers. Alan Turing is also seen as a founder of AI. However, his achievements weren’t fully acknowledged during his time. This was due to the confidential nature of his work under the Official Secrets Act and the widespread homophobia of that era. This discrimination ultimately led to his prosecution and tragic suicide in 1954.
The Turing Award is the highest distinction in computer science and is named after him.
Marvin Minsky
A member of the Dartmouth Conference, Minsky was a cognitive and computer scientist who collaborated with John McCarthy and co-founded the MIT’s AI laboratory in 1959.
He produced valuable research on artificial neural networks and artificial intelligence. He won the Turing Award in 1969.
Allen Newell
Also present at Dartmouth, Newell’s contributions to AI included the Information Processing Language in 1956, and two of the earliest AI programs, the Logic Theory Machine and the General Problem Solver with his colleague Herbert S. Simon. Both won the Turing Award in 1975.
Claude Shannon
The father of information theory helped organize the Dartmouth Conference. His paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” and subsequent research has been a fundamental contribution to natural language processing and computational linguistics.
Nathaniel Rochester
Renown for writing the first assembler that allowed programs to be written in short comments as opposed to numbers. He’s also know for designing IBM’s first commercial computer, the IBM 701. Rochester was also an organizer of the Dartmouth Conference and is renown for his study of pattern recognition and intelligent machines.
Geoffrey Hinton
Alongside Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, Geoff Hinton is often to referred as one of the “Godfathers of AI”.
His contributions, however, have been far more recent than John McCarthy’s, but still significant. His work on artificial neural networks has earned him and his peers the title of the fathers of Deep Learning.