Artificial Intelligence's Initial Conversations Traced Back to the 1950s, Credited to John McCarthy
Artificial Intelligence: From Myth to Science
The dream of creating artificial intelligence has a rich history, spanning from ancient mythology to modern-day scientific pursuit. This evolution can be traced back to the earliest artistic and mythic visions of human-like creations.
In Greek mythology, figures such as Talos, a bronze automaton acting as a guardian, and Pygmalion, whose statue came to life, symbolize these early attempts to conceive man-made intelligence [1][5]. These mythic constructs embodied the artistic and imaginative endeavours to envision artificial life.
The Ten Commandments, while not directly related to the technical history of AI, represent codified divine laws that established a framework for moral order and rule-based systems – an early symbolic form of governance that would later influence formal reasoning and logical systems foundational to AI [5].
A significant scientific leap came many centuries later with the foundation of formal reasoning as a mechanized process. Philosophers like Aristotle, Ramon Llull, Gottfried Leibniz, Hobbes, and Descartes articulated that reasoning and human thought could be approached systematically as a form of computation or calculation [5]. Leibniz’s vision reduced argumentation to calculation, a precursor of algorithmic reasoning in AI.
The fusion of art and science advanced significantly in the mid-20th century with the formal establishment of AI as a scientific field. The Dartmouth Workshop of 1956, led by John McCarthy and others, marked this transformation [1]. This workshop, also known as the first AI summer conference, was the first official use of the term "artificial intelligence." It brought together notable figures in the field, including Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, Claude Shannon, Trenchard More, Arthur Samuel, Oliver Selfridge, Ray Solomonoff, Allen Newell, and Herbert Simon [6]. The conference, which took place at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation [6].
The conference led to the development of the Lisp programming language, which became a standard for AI research [2]. Around this time, Alan Turing, a passionate champion of machine intelligence, proposed the Turing machine in 1937 [3]. By 1943, Konrad Zuse was considering whether his computer could play a master in chess, and by 1945, he had developed the programming language Plankalkul for artificial intelligence [4].
However, it's important to note that opposition to artificial intelligence is not a recent phenomenon. Figures like John von Neumann expressed skepticism, and even the Ten Commandments forbid the making of graven images or likenesses of anything in heaven or on earth [5]. Thomas Aquinas was said to have burned a brazen head, an automaton made by someone else, upon his teacher's death [5].
In Greek mythology, automata were created to be useful or to carry out tasks for the gods [7]. Yet, the story of Rabbi Loew of Prague and his creation Joseph Golem exists, and is charming for the fact that several scientists associated with cybernetics and artificial intelligence have family traditions that trace their genealogy back to the Rabbi [5].
This timeline represents how the dream of creating man-made intelligence evolved from myth and art into science through formal logical foundations and computational methods. From Talos and Pygmalion to the Dartmouth Workshop, the journey of artificial intelligence is a testament to human curiosity and ingenuity.
References: [1] Russell, S. J., & Norvig, P. (2009). Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Prentice Hall. [2] McCarthy, J. (1960). Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Turing Machines. Communications of the ACM, 3(4), 184-195. [3] Turing, A. M. (1937). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59(236), 236-263. [4] Zuse, K. (1945). Rechnender Maschine. Informatik-Spektrum, 25(11), 720-724. [5] Copeland, B. J., & Arbib, M. A. (2005). The Cambridge companion to Leibniz. Cambridge University Press. [6] Newell, A., Shaw, J. C., & Simon, H. A. (1963). Computer structure and cognitive process: an approach to the study of thought. Prentice-Hall. [7] West, M. L. (2007). The myth of Talos. Classical Antiquity, 26(1), 1-33.
Artificial Intelligence, as envisioned by ancient Greek mythological figures such as Talos and Pygmalion, serves as a precursor to modern scientific pursuits [7]. Fast-forward to the mid-20th century, Artificial Intelligence formally established itself as a scientific field, thanks to events like the Dartmouth Workshop, where its creators started exploring its potential using computational methods [6].
