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Did you know the term 'Artificial Intelligence' was coined 71 years ago?
The term “Artificial Intelligence” was coined by computer scientist in 1955, when he used it in a proposal for a summer research project at Dartmouth College.
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AI may be coming for your job today, but it has been 71 years since the term first came into existence.
The term “Artificial Intelligence” was coined by computer scientist John McCarthy in 1955, when he used it in a proposal for a summer research project at Dartmouth College in the US.
According to the proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project, dated August 31, 1955, it was co-authored by McCarthy, Marvin L. Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude E. Shannon.
The plan was quite small: a two-month study involving 10 people at Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956. But the idea behind it was ambitious. The researchers believed that machines could be made to simulate human intelligence.
The big idea
The researchers' proposal said they would work on ways to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve problems that were then considered the domain of humans and improve themselves.
Their central idea was summed up in one sentence: “Every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.”
In other words, they were asking whether human intelligence could be broken down into enough small, understandable parts for a machine to copy.
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But Turing got there first
The question of whether machines could think had already been raised several years earlier.
In 1950, British mathematician Alan Turing published a paper titled Computing Machinery and Intelligence. He opened it with a simple question: “Can machines think?”
But Turing did not want to get stuck arguing over what exactly the words “machine” and “think” meant. Instead, he suggested replacing the question with a more practical one.
Turing proposed a game in which a person would communicate with another person and a machine without seeing them. The challenge was to determine whether the machine could respond convincingly enough to be mistaken for a human.
He called it the “Imitation Game”, an idea that later became known as the Turing Test.
Turing's idea was to move away from the difficult question of what it means for a machine to think and instead ask whether a machine could imitate human behaviour convincingly.
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Then came Dartmouth
By 1956, researchers were ready to take these ideas a step further.
John McCarthy organised the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, bringing a small group of scientists together in Hanover, New Hampshire.
The meeting is widely regarded as the birth of AI as a field of research. The researchers were not thinking about chatbots writing emails, AI making videos or machines taking over office tasks. They were trying to understand something much more basic: whether machines could learn, reason and carry out tasks that appeared to require human intelligence.
Their AI wish list
The 1955 proposal listed several areas the researchers wanted to explore, including automatic computers, programming computers to use language, neuron nets, self-improvement, abstractions, randomness and creativity.
Professor of Philosophy James Moor said that the researchers who gathered in Hanover were thinking about ways to make machines more cognizant and wanted to create a framework for better understanding human intelligence.
