What is AI?
What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
First and foremost, AI is what is known as a ‘suitcase word’ — a term so densely packed with different definitions and connotations that it’s exact meaning varies based on who, when, where and how you ask.
Nevertheless, and with that caveat in mind, to best understand what AI is today, we must look at what it once was.
The term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was made known in 1955 by Marvin Minsky and his colleagues in a proposal for ‘The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence’ — a six week long workshop with rather lofty goals.
“The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that 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. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.”
Of course, AI was not solved in the summer of 1956, but by most accounts the summer of ’56 did mark the beginning of what is known as AI’s first wave.
This first wave saw unbridled enthusiasm from universities, private businesses and the U.S. military, all who recognized the potential of using raw computing power to apply pattern recognition to large datasets and then “learn” from those patterns.
AI’s first wave, heavily reliant on pattern recognition and raw computational power lasted until the mid ‘70’s when Edward (Ted) Shortliffe developed MYCIN — an AI program that could identify what bacteria was causing a patient’s infection and propose an appropriate prescription for antibiotics based on the patient’s weight — at Stanford University.
MYCIN was one of the first public-facing instances of a rule-based system; ‘If this then that’ logic that moved the field away from simple pattern detection towards the ability to actually take action based upon said patterns.
This rule-based understanding of AI set the tone for the next decade, AI’s second wave, which saw advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP), computer vision and knowledge graphs.
Despite these advancements in AI, by the early 80’s it became clear that the great expectations put forth by the likes of Minsky and Shortliffe were more fantastical than anticipated, and the world, disappointed that artificial intelligence hadn’t already revolutionized the world, simply lost interest.
AI’s first winter, as it is known, lasted almost thirty years, until 2010 when Siri, an example of speech recognition and natural language generation (NLG) technologies (both subfields of AI that progressed and persevered despite the AI winter) made its public debut.
Soon after Siri the world saw IBM’s Watson win Jeopardy. And from there, AI’s third wave began captivating the public (and its investors) with more vigor than ever before and ultimately leaving us with today’s AI — a composite of subfields like machine learning, speech recognition, natural language processing, image and video recognition, computer vision and robotics.
So, what is AI in 2018?
It is the culmination of sixty years worth of research and experimentation, a host of powerful mathematical and computational methods developed in and out of public view, aimed towards achieving that same, singular goal put forth by Minsky et. al. in 1955:
In other words, AI is not a single entity. It is intangible, a field of study, research and experimentation — not unlike physics or mathematics or chemistry — that yields new theories and equations and products and subfields, each aimed at solving a unique problem. It is an ever-expanding area of expertise with a complex history.
As for the nature of those numerous theories, equations, products and subfields, that will have to wait for another post…
P.S. Curious about those Dow Jones AI Center of Excellence logos you noticed? Check back soon for some exciting news!
