Concept: Artificial Intelligence

Definition: the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. 

Related Terms: Machine Learning; Robot; Computer; Chatbot; Large Language Model

Description: Above is a nuts and bolts definition of artificial intelligence (AI) from Britannica. However, as Karen Hao writes in Empire of AI, “…artificial intelligence is a technology that takes many forms. It is in fact a multitude of technologies that shape-shift and evolve, not merely based on technical merit but with the ideological drives of the people who create them and the winds of hype and commercialization.”

The evolution of the concept of AI reveals that the idea of intelligence is highly mutable and contextually determined. In Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write, former Microsoft engineer and current Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University Dennis Yi Tenen locates the idea of intelligent machines much further back than we might expect. He begins with medieval Arab Tunisian scholar Ibn Khaldun’s description of the use of zairajah, or language-based divination charts. Tenen then traces the journey of language-based “computers” to the German Baroque mathematician Athanasius Kircher’s Mathematical Organ, the complementary work of British mathematicians Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage in the 1800s, finally arriving at twentieth-century story-writing templates. 

Below is a more conventional timeline of artificial intelligence and related terms.

1923: Czech playwright Katel Capek creates the word “robot” for his play R.U.R. “Robot” is a shortened form of the Czech word “robotnik,” meaning “forced labor,” itself derived from a Slavic word for “slave.”

1950: Alan Turing, British mathematician and theoretical computer scientist, asks, “Can machines think?” in his landmark treatise on artificial intelligence, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” After defining the words “machine” and “think,” he addresses nine common objections to artificial intelligence. He also famously proposes what will come to be known as “the Turing test” – a guessing game where a computer tries to fool a human into thinking that it is a fellow human. Turing developed automatic calculating machines, encrypted vocal communication devices, and rudimentary computers during his work at the British intelligence agency the Government Code and Cypher School, Bell Labs, and the National Physical Laboratory.

1956: The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence is generally accepted as the launch of artificial intelligence as a research discipline. Twenty scientists from the fields of mathematics, cryptography, and cognitive science to tackle the question of thinking machines during this six to eight week workshop. Dartmouth professor and workshop organizer John McCarthy originally named the field that united them “automata studies.” He eventually chose to rebrand it “artificial intelligence” in the hopes that this new name would attract more support for the research.

2015: OpenAI is founded with the stated mission of inventing beneficial artificial general intelligence (AGI). AGI is a theoretical point in AI research in which computers can meet or exceed human performance of economically valuable tasks. OpenAI claims that the development of AGI is inevitable but leaves the definition intentionally vague so that it can change it in order to justify the company’s actions.

— CT