James E. Gaskin has a great piece about the slow maturation of artificial intelligence that helps answer the question: where's the artificial intelligence?
Artificial intelligence promised us great technology. But has it delivered?Stanford University computer science professor John McCarthy coined the phrase 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, HAL from the movie 2001 and R2D2 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, then artificial intelligence has been a huge disappointment.
And yet artificial intelligence is all around us... just going by different names. Once some bit of artificial intelligence actually works it stops being called "artificial intelligence" and gets named something like "Google search" or "GPS route planning" or "Half-Life".
