Artificial Intelligence

Image by Bovee & Thill, CC BY 2.0/Wikimedia Commons

The concept of artificial intelligence (AI)—machines that can think and learn on their own—is not a new one. The word "robot" first appeared in a 1920 Czech-language play by  Karel Čapek called R.U.R., which depicts them as synthetically-created humanoids who eventually destroy humanity in an act of revolution against the exploitation of their labor.¹ Similar robots have also long been popular throughout science fiction, most notably in the work of Isaac Asimov.

However, most historians trace the beginning of real-world artificial intelligence's development to the 1940s and 1950s, when WWII and its aftermath accelerated technological development. Notable events include Alan Turing's introduction of the eponymous Turing test, the goal of which is to determine whether one's interlocutor is human or machine, and a 1956 workshop funded by the RAND Corporation, the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence.² At the Dartmouth workshop, pioneering researchers including John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, and John Nash met to discuss a number of topics that would define the field of artificial intelligence for many years to come.³

Over subsequent decades, the evolution of artificial intelligence proceeded in fits and starts as government and industrial interest in the technology waxed and waned. In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer defeated then-World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov, becoming the first AI program to do so.⁴ In the twenty-first century, progress on AI development rapidly accelerated. 2011 saw Watson, another IBM supercomputer designed to answer natural language questions, defeat two of the most successful Jeopardy! champions in a widely viewed television special.⁵ And in late 2022, OpenAI released the first widely available version of ChatGPT, a chatbot that responds to text prompts in uncannily human ways, reigniting cultural conversations about artificial intelligence and its societal impact.⁶

1. Sarangi and Sharma 2019, 14.

2. Anyoha 2017.

3. Sarangi and Sharma 2019, 15–16.

4. Tate 2014.

5. Jennings 2011.

6. Roose 2022.

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