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(Homeland) - Here are some intriguing facts you might not know about artificial intelligence.
The prevalence of artificial intelligence in our daily lives has significantly increased. Nowadays, we see AI technology in smartphones, cybersecurity, and automobiles. But when did the concept of AI first emerge, and what does its future hold?
1. AI Was Conceptualized as Early as the 1600s
While ancient Greeks wrote about 'intelligent robots' in religious mythology, artificial intelligence was first conceptualized by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a German mathematician and philosopher, in the late 17th century.
When Leibniz was just 20 years old, he proposed a theory that could be used to enable machines to autonomously generate ideas. He hypothesized that human thought, in any capacity, could be quantified and was the intricate combination of basic concepts. Thus, Leibniz suggested that this combination could be replicated to allow a machine to perform similarly.
Leibniz named this theoretical mechanism the 'amazing intellect tool' and hypothesized that it could answer any question posed to it. However, the idea of a thinking machine has been carefully scrutinized. Many believe that human thought is a form of spiritual expression or irreproducible, rather than something rooted in science, a viewpoint that some still hold today.
This 'amazing intellect tool' has never been successfully created, and we have yet to see a machine capable of answering every question in the world. However, significant strides are being made to create such a machine, as seen in ChatGPT and similar tools.
2. The Term 'Artificial Intelligence' Was Coined in 1956
While concepts surrounding artificial intelligence have been discussed for centuries, the term itself wasn't formally coined until 1956 at a conference at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. At this conference, the field of AI was officially born alongside the emergence of this term.
Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw, and Herbert Simon introduced the Logic Theorist program, designed to mimic cognitive processes and solve problems found in the human mind.
After the introduction of the Logic Theorist program, Marvin Minsky, a cognitive scientist at MIT, along with several other renowned researchers and scientists, spoke about their confidence in this technology. Alan Turing, the British mathematician, also wrote a paper on artificial intelligence in the 1950s, discussing the creation of independently thinking machines and testing their intelligence.
3. AI is Everywhere Nowadays
Although we haven't seen smart machines or robots functioning like humans, AI is certainly being developed and improved every year, and it has been utilized in various ways across many industries.
First, take a look at your smartphone! AI is used in voice assistants, such as Google Assistant, Siri, Bixby, Cortana, or Alexa. These virtual assistants utilize AI to understand your voice and make decisions based on what you request or instruct. Face recognition feature on smartphones also utilizes AI, as well as in object recognition programs (such as those provided by Samsung's Bixby Vision).
AI is now also being deployed in manufacturing, education, and healthcare industries. For example, AI is being developed to aid doctors in diagnosis and treatment planning. AI may soon be used to automate some basic functions to give doctors more time in their daily schedules.
You can also find the presence of artificial intelligence in automobiles. The renowned electric car company Tesla utilizes AI in its autopilot function, allowing cars to view upcoming road segments and make decisions based on the information the system gathers.
