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In this brief history, the beginnings of artificial intelligence are traced to philosophy, fiction, and imagination. Early inventions in electronics, engineering, and many other disciplines have influenced AI. Some early milestones include work in problems solving which included basic work in learning, knowledge representation, and inference as well as demonstration programs in language understanding, translation, theorem proving, associative memory, and knowledge-based systems. The article ends with a brief examination of influential organizations and current issues facing the field.
THe history of AI is a history of fantasies, possibilities, demonstrations, and promise. Ever since Homer wrote of mechanical "tripods" waiting on the gods at dinner, imagined mechanical assistants have been a part of our culture. However, only in the last half century have we, the AI community, been able to build experimental machines that test hypotheses about the mechanisms of thought and intelligent behavior and thereby demonstrate mechanisms that formerly existed only as theoretical possibilities. Although achieving full-blown artificial intelligence remains in the future, we must maintain the ongoing dialogue about the implications of realizing the promise.1
Philosophers have floated the possibility of intelligent machines as a literary device to help us define what it means to be human. René Descartes, for example, seems to have been more interested in "mechanical man" as a metaphor than as a possibility. Gottfried WiIhelm Leibniz, on the other hand, seemed to see the possibility of mechanical reasoning devices using rules of logic to settle disputes. Both Leibniz and Biaise Pascal designed calculating machines that mechanized arithmetic, which had hitherto been the province of learned men called "calculators," but they never made the claim that the devices could think. Etienne Bonnot, Abbé de Condillac used the metaphor of a statue into whose head we poured nuggets of knowledge, asking at what point it would know enough to appear to be intelligent.
Science fiction writers have used the possibility of intelligent machines to advance the fantasy of intelligent nonhumans, as well as to make us think about our own human characteristics. Jules Verne in the nineteenth century and Isaac Asimov in the twentieth are the best known, but there have been many others including L. Frank Baum, who gave us the Wizard of Oz. Baum wrote of several robots and...