AI, Happy 67th Birthday!

I know what you’re thinking, "67th birthday? Isn’t Microsoft leading the charge for AI; you know, the way Facebook, er, Meta is leading the charge for the metaverse?"?

One of my all-time favorite lines from Bugs Bunny appeared in the cartoon Bully for Bugs, when he, performing as a matador, references the naivete of a charging bull as he laughingly relates: “What a gulli-bull… what a nin-cow-poop… what an im-bess-ile…what an ultramaroon.” And in the end, of course, Bugs triumphs over the raging bull.

So, here’s the thing about artificial intelligence: It’s not new. In 1956, the RAND Corporation designed a program to mimic the problem-solving skills of a human; it is considered the first AI program.

Over the course of the next two decades, AI greatly expanded. Computers, machine learning, voice transcription and language translation… it was a party and everyone was invited. In 1970, Marvin Minsky (the cognitive and computer scientist who in 1958 co-founded what is now known as the MIT Computer Science and AI Laboratory) predicted that by the end of that decade, “we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.” For reference, it was the decade Speak & Spell was launched by Texas Instruments.

The problem for AI in the 1970s wasn’t that computers were not big enough (they were huge), they just weren’t powerful or fast enough. And so it goes. But then came the 1980s and Edward Feigenbaum, who created a program that could mimic the decision-making process of a human expert. But then funding became an issue (thank you Gordon Gekko).

But it turns out the best thing that could happen to AI was not having government funding, because in the 1990s and 2000s, AI thrived. Remember when IBM’s Deep Blue chess-playing computer beat grand master Gary Kasparov? Thanks to increased storage capacity and faster processing speeds, Y2K computers could handle the job, enabling AI to find its footing.

And there you go. Language technology was soon off to the races (hey Siri, hey Alexa), along with voice recognition. Not to mention autonomous vehicles (maybe we should not mention them just yet). The possibilities are seemingly endless. In fact, AI has evolved so much that governments around the world are already discussing ethics and creating policies and regulations (yeah, government intervention). I mean, consider that this post may actually have been written by ChatGPT as an act of self-promotion.

Not bad for a 67-year-old technology.