Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Turing and Shannon expected AI by 1955
Coffee at Bell Labs
Both were obsessed with the idea. They believed computers, which barely existed yet, in analog form, would become smarter than humans around 1955, and they thought anyone who doubted it was being absolutely ridiculous.
What they wanted
When they asked each other what they would want such a computer to do, the answer was to solve math problems, write poetry, and cure diseases. The same wish has come up again and again in the decades since.
What came true
Today AI is solving novel math problems and discovering other things. It writes poetry too, though not very good poetry. Sam Altman has read a bunch of what the two men wrote at the time, and he is sad they are not here to see it, because they were so right about everything. He thinks they would have looked at it and said, all right, you've done it.
How did Shannon and Turing think machines could think?
Turing's 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, proposed replacing the question of whether machines think with an imitation game judged through conversation. That same year Shannon published a paper on programming a computer to play chess. He estimated that a chess game has about 10 to the power 120 possible variations, far too many to search completely. The figure is now known as the Shannon number.
Why did early AI forecasts run so optimistic?
In 1965, the economist and AI researcher Herbert Simon predicted that machines would be capable within twenty years of doing any work a man can do. Marvin Minsky made similarly bold forecasts in the 1960s. Early programs proved theorems and played checkers, which made general intelligence look close. When progress stalled, research funding fell sharply in the 1970s, a period now called the first AI winter.
How did artificial intelligence get its name?
In 1955, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon proposed a summer research project at Dartmouth College. McCarthy chose the term artificial intelligence for the proposal, partly to set the field apart from cybernetics. The workshop took place in the summer of 1956. The proposal asked for a two-month study by ten researchers.
More from David Senra
