Artificial intelligence has been in the headlines in recent months because of the threat it may pose to humanity. Yet, as MICHAEL WOOLDRIDGE reveals, the idea of AI, and the fears surrounding it, are centuries old
BEHIND THE NEWS
Over the past decade, artificial intelligence (AI) has become the most hyped technology since the World Wide Web. Its development has been driven by enormous investment from big tech companies desperate to steal a march on their competitors – and the future of trillion-dollar businesses hinges on whether it succeeds or fails. Progress has been so rapid that some informed observers even claim that machines with the full range of human capabilities (‘general AI’) may soon be here.
Amid all the excitement, it is easy to forget that AI is not a new field. Indeed, the idea of AI is an ancient one: it appears throughout recorded history in one form or another. Ancient Greek legends feature Hephaestus, divine blacksmith to the gods, who created metal automata to serve Olympus. Jewish folklore has the myth of the golem, a creature fashioned from mud and given life through arcane rituals. Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein – the urtext for science fiction – is all about creating artificial life. And Fritz Lang’s seminal 1927 film Metropolis established an astonishing number of fantasy horror tropes with its Maschinenmensch – the ‘machine-human’ robot that wreaks murderous chaos.
Actually creating AI, however, remained firmly in the realm of science fiction until the advent of the first digital computers soon after the end of the Second World War. Central to this story is Alan Turing, the brilliant British mathematician best known for his work cracking Nazi ciphers at Bletchley Park. Though his code-breaking work was vital for the Allied war effort, Turing deserves to be at least as well known for his work on the development of computers and AI. While studying for his PhD in the 1930s, he produced a design for a mathematical device now known as a ‘Turing machine’, providing a blueprint for computers that is still standard today.
In 1948, Turing took a job at Manchester University to work on Britain’s first computer, the so-called ‘Manchester baby’. The advent of computers sparked a wave of curiosity about these ‘electronic brains’, which seemed to be capable of dazzling intellectual feats. Turing apparently became frustrated by dogmatic arguments that intelligent machines were impossible and, in a 1950 article in the journal MIND, sought to settle the debate. He proposed a method – which he called the Imitation Game but
