In 1955, the term Artificial Intelligence was coined for the first time. 1955 also saw the first artificial intelligence programme, Logic Theorist, developed. It was concluded in a conference at Dartmouth College in 1956 that Artificial Intelligence should be treated as an academic field.
Turing’s vision and the imitation game
These two significant developments came shortly after the first milestone development on the concept, which asked if machines could think, with Turing Test details published in 1950. Alan Turing was a British mathematician and was called the father of computer science by many, according to an explainer from ScienceDirect.
His 1950 paper, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, was based on this core question, that, – can a machine think? – proposing ‘imitation games’ as means to assess machine intelligence. The Turing Test was gauged to see if a machine could sustain a real-time written conversation so convincingly that a human judge cannot reliably tell it apart from a human -means, a programme showing human-like language response.
According to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, ‘Turing himself thought that it would not be too long before we did have digital computers that could “do well” in the Imitation Game’ (or intelligent machines).
Early Chatbots to modern super-intelligent machines
75 years post that, the world is on the brink of witnessing another industrial revolution, with rapid artificial intelligence advancement – an innovation that is many steps ahead – with not just intelligent, but super-intelligent programmes or artificial intelligence tools used digitally now, be it on computer terminals or tablets or smartphones.
The chatbot journey that began in 1965, with the creation of ELIZA, an interactive programme, by Joseph Weizenbaum, has seen serious tech developments in between, like the first intelligent mobile robot, Shakey, in 1966; WABOT-1, the first humanoid robot in Japan, in 1972; the first driverless car developed in 1986 in Germany; the World Wide Web in 1989; the chatbot A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) in 1995; the machine intelligence playing chess and beating a human, with IBM’s Deep Blue playing against world chess champion Garry Kasparov, in 1997; Honda’s ASIMO humanoid robot in 2000 that could walk as fast as humans; self-generated drop-down search queries on internet search engines in 2000s and 2010s: to LLM chatbot ChatGPT in November 2022, and rapidly advancing other major artificial intelligence tools like Gemini, Copilot, Claude, Perplexity AI, Adobe Firefly, GitHub Copilot, Synthesia, Vertex AI, and many others.
Today’s reality: Steps beyond ‘doing well’
True, machines can’t think, as Turing once said that it is even too meaningless to deserve discussion, but machines now can brilliantly imitate – trained and equipped with human thinking style pattern on different questions we ask them to answer, like the ‘extended thinking’ option in ChatGPT (to be technically precise, a fast reasoning artificial intelligence tool) and similar options in other artificial intelligence tools.
Quoting Turing’s words, the digital computers today, equipped with artificial intelligence tools – are doing much more than a normal ‘do well’ in the imitation game.
From simple machine intelligent behaviours like suggesting drop-down menus – like Google Suggest in 2004, Siri & Voice Prediction in 2008, Amazon Alexa and Apple QuickType in 2014 – to deep learning and generative shift now, that is rapidly advancing with generative artificial intelligence applications, and automation tools. Data, riding on artificial intelligence applications, are the latest core tools of the next industrial revolution.
