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The grand promise of intelligent machines underestimated the complexity of reproducing human cognition
Artificial intelligence promised us great technology, but has it delivered? Stanford University computer science professor John McCarthy coined the term in 1956 to mean "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines." In the early years of the artificial-intelligence movement, enthusiasm ran high and artificial-intelligence pioneers made some bold predictions.
In 1965, artificial-intelligence innovator Herbert Simon said that "machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do."
Two years later, MIT researcher Marvin Minsky predicted. "Within a generation . . . the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved."
Popular culture jumped onto the artificial-intelligence bandwagon and gave us Rosie the Robot from "The Jetsons" television series. HAL from the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" and R2-D2 from "Star Wars."
Yet here we are, decades later, and what has artificial intelligence done for us lately? If you define artificial intelligence as self-aware, self-learning, mobile systems,artificial intelligence has been a huge disappointment.
On the other hand,every time you search the Web, get a movie recommendation from NetFlix, or speak to a telephone voice-recognition system, tools developed chasing the great promise of intelligent machines do the work. In other words, we may not have fullfunctioning robots that cater to our every need, but artificial intelligence is embedded in our everyday lives.
"Once tools get far enough out of the lab, they're no longer AI, just common computer science," says George Luger, a professor at the University of New Mexico."AI just went to work."
One of the biggest boosts to artificial intelligence is Moore's Law, because artificial intelligence needs CPU power."lt took 20 years to go from a 5MHz chip to a 50OMHz chip, but only eight months after that to get to a IGHz chip," says futurist Daniel Burrus, author of Technotrends: How to Use Technology to Go Beyond Your Competition and founder of Burrus Research.
"The new Sony Playstation came out a year ago," Burrus says,"but if it came out five years earlier, it would be considered a supercomputer." He likens the growth of processing power on a graph to a hockey stick."In the '90s, the graph was still low. In 2000, the graph...