Artificial Intelligence
The surprising thing is how many people thought about AI hundreds of years ago.
Depictions of omniscient machines such as computers were widely discussed in popular literature in the early 1700s.
When Jonathan Swift published his novel Gulliver's Travels in 1726, he included a description of a machine for improving knowledge through practical and mechanical operations, which is what computers do today.
In 1927, a robot girl starred in the science fiction film Metropolis directed by Fritz Lang. It is also notable because it was the first on-screen portrayal of a robot in a film, which inspired other famous futuristic films.
In 1939 John Vincent Atanasoff (physicist and inventor), along with his graduate student assistant Clifford Perry, built the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC), which weighed over 700 pounds and could solve 29 linear equations simultaneously at Iowa State University.
Computer scientist Edmund Berkeley stated in 1949 that machines are capable of handling large amounts of information with speed and efficiency, and therefore a machine can think.
In 1950, 'Claude Shannon', an American mathematician, electrical engineer and cryptographer, known as the father of information theory, published a project titled "A Chess Playing Computer" as the first paper on building a chess playing computer.
In 1952, Arthur Samuels created the first self-learning computer with the ability to compete against human players in the game of checkers.
In 1954, IBM experimented with automated machine translations.
The term "artificial intelligence" was first coined by John McCarthy in 1955. He proposed it in 1956 at the famous Dartmouth conference.
In 1959, Arthur Samuel coined the term machine learning.
UniMed became the first industrial robot to work on an assembly line in 1961 at a General Motors plant in New Jersey.
In 1963, McCarthy started the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford.
In 1965, Joseph Weissenbaum developed "ELIZA", an interactive program that can carry out a conversation in English on any topic.
The film 2001: A Space Odyssey directed by film director Stanley Kubrick was released in 1968, bringing AI into the mainstream.
In 1977, the film Star Wars: A New Hope was released, directed by George Lucas, who incorporated a humanoid robot as one of the characters.
In 1980, Japan created a humanoid robot that could communicate with a human and play music on an electronic instrument.
A Mercedes-Benz van equipped with cameras and sensors became the first driverless car in 1986, capable of driving on empty streets at speeds of up to 55 mph.
In 1988, Rollo Carpenter created the chatbot Jabberwocky, which simulates natural human interaction in an interesting, entertaining and humorous way.
Inspired by Joseph Weisenbaum's ELIZA project, Richard Wallace created the chatbot A.L.I.C.E (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computing Enterprise) in 1995.
In 1997, Deep Blue became the first computer chess-playing program to win the World Chess Championship.
In 1998, the Furby became the first pet robot, created by Dave Hampton and Caleb Chung.
Steven Spielberg released "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" in 2001, a film about a child-like android programmed with the ability to fall in love.
In 2007, Fei Fei Li and colleagues at Princeton University began assembling ImageNet, a large database of annotated images designed to aid visual object recognition software research.
In 2009, search giant Google secretly began developing a driverless car, and in 2014, it became the first company to pass a US state self-driving test.
In 2011 IBM's natural language question-and-answer computer Watson participated in the television game Jeopardy! This marked a significant advancement of AI as the centerpiece of human conversations.
Apple launched Siri in 2011 as a voice-controlled personal assistant for iPhone users to understand and respond to human users. The launch of Siri was followed by the introduction of Google Now in 2012 and Microsoft Cortana in 2014.
In 2016, Hanson Robotics introduced Sophia, a humanoid robot, as the first "robot citizen."
In 2018, Alibaba created an AI model that scored 82.44 on a set of 100,000 questions, against which students scored 82.30 on a Stanford University reading and comprehension test.
OpenAI GPT-3 was first introduced in May 2020 and beta testing began in June 2020. OpenAI GPT-3 is a language model that generates text using pre-trained algorithms.