The term Artificial Intelligence, or AI for short, was coined by computer scientist John McCarthy in 1956. AI can be defined most simply as a machine that thinks. More broadly, a machine is said to have artificial intelligence if it can interpret data, learn from the data, and use that knowledge to adapt and achieve specific goals.
AI can be separated into two categories – weak and strong. Most AI today is considered weak AI, meaning that it was created to focus on one specific task, mimicking some aspect of human intelligence. Examples of weak AI include SIRI, Alexa, speech to text recognition, customer service chatbots, recommendation engines, and pre-screening for job or university applications.
On the other hand, strong AI is a machine that can think exactly like us, including a self-aware consciousness that can solve problems, learn, and plan for the future. In the 1950s, Alan Turing, considered to be the father of computer science, developed the Turing Test to determine whether a machine has developed the ability to think like us. Turing argued that, if a machine could trick a human into thinking it was also a human, that meant it had strong AI. Contemporary thinkers argue that there is more to thinking like us than just being able to fool us. An argument against the Turing Test is a famous thought experiment known as The Chinese Room, developed in 1980 by John Searle. If you were isolated in a room and given a codebook telling you how to respond to messages in Chinese which were passed under the door, your responses would convince the native speakers on the other side of the door that you could speak Chinese, when really you were just manipulating data based on a set of rules. The Chinese Room argues that passing for human isn’t enough to qualify for strong AI, and that strong AI requires that the machine has actual understanding, something that Searle believed is impossible to achieve.
Although AI is far from a new topic, the years from 1950 to 2010 are considered the AI Winter, as not much progress was made during that time, but rather many small improvements that eventually led to the start of what is known as the AI Revolution in 2010, that continues today.
Some helpful links:
CrashCourse. (2016, August 8). Artificial Intelligence & Personhood: Crash Course Philosophy #23 [Video]. Youtube. https://youtu.be/39EdqUbj92U
CrashCourse. (2019, August 9). What Is Artificial Intelligence? Crash Course AI #1 [Video]. Youtube. https://youtu.be/a0_lo_GDcFw
IBM. (n.d.). What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?. IBM. https://www.ibm.com/topics/artificial-intelligence
