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How AI Ate the World
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How AI Ate the World

A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence — And Its Long Future

Chris Stokel-Walker
Canbury Press, 2024
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Philosophers and science fiction writers have long imagined machines that could think and communicate like humans. In the 1950s, brilliant thinkers laid the theoretical foundations for artificial intelligence or AI. As computers became more and more powerful, AI became a practical possibility, though, for decades, its development moved forward in stops and starts. Today, machine learning and generative AI have allowed people to incorporate AI into a vast array of fields, including health care, finance, entertainment, and people’s personal lives, raising myriad ethical and political concerns.

Summary

Modern AI’s theoretical foundations date to the 1950s.

AI innovations may be the most groundbreaking tech developments of recent times, but their roots lie in the 1950s. Over the course of that decade, British mathematician Alan Turing, and American mathematician John McCarthy, together with a host of other great minds in the nascent field of computing, began formulating the theoretical foundations of what would become artificial intelligence.

Turing, who broke the German army’s “Enigma code” during the Second World War — and thereby helped win the war — believed the human brain was a kind of computing machine. In the late 1940s, he developed a nascent computer program, Turochamp, that could, in principle, play a game of chess. However, at the time, no machine existed that was powerful enough to run the program. Later, in an academic paper published in 1950, Turing proposed what he called the “Turing test,” premised on his belief that, someday, computers would grow sophisticated enough that they would be able to provide responses that were indistinguishable from human responses. During the test, a human judge would communicate with a group of “players” via computer...

About the Author

Chris Stokel-Walker is a British journalist. He is the author of YouTubers: How YouTube Shook Up TV and Created a New Generation of Stars and TikTok Boom: China’s Dynamite App and the Superpower Race for Social Media.

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