Beyond the Algorithm

People have speculated about the possibility of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for centuries.

People have imagined creating intelligent machines since ancient times. Greek myths featured mechanical creatures capable of independent thought. The great 17th-century philosopher René Descartes theorized that the human mind was machine-like and posited that mathematics might be able to explain its functions. The first real advances in artificial intelligence came during the Second World War when British mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing developed his Turing machine. But it wasn’t until the legendary 1956 Dartmouth College “Dartmouth Conference,” which included AI founders like Alan Turing, Marvin Minsky, and Herbert A. Simon, that AI became a real research field. Then the 1960s and 1970s saw significant advances in “expert systems” capable of human-like analysis.

AI leverages Machine Learning (ML) to analyze data, make predictions, and automate tasks.

People refer to the AI systems and tools that exist today as “narrow” AI. This form of AI performs specific tasks — like image recognition or natural language...