I. A Brief History of AI
The Inception
Artificial Intelligence, while it sounds like a new word, has been widely used or mis-used at a great of varieties of newspaper articles for the sizzles in its own right. However, it has been in existence for more than 60 years now. In 1950, The British mathematician and logician Alan Turing published his landmark paper, "Computers and Intelligence," in which he proposed what comes to be known as The Turing Test, in which The tester is separated from The subject (a human and a machine), asking subjects random questions through some device, such as a keyboard. Multiple tests (usually within 5 minutes), if more than 30% of the testers are not sure whether the subject is a human or a machine, then the machine passes the test and is considered to have human intelligence.
Six years later, in August 1956, at Dartmouth College in the United States, John McCarthy (founder of LISP), Marvin Minsky (expert in artificial intelligence and cognition), Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory), Allen Newell (a computer scientist), Herbert Simon (a Nobel laureate in economics) and others got together to discuss the use of machines to mimic human learning and other aspects of intelligence.The conference, which lasted two months, formally adopted the term "Artificial Intelligence" at McCarthy's suggestion. Hence, the birth of AI over half a century ago.
The year 1956 is recognized as the inception year of artificial intelligence. "Let the machine to imitate human learning and other aspects of intelligence" has become the fundamental goal of artificial intelligence to achieve.
The Establishment of the International Joint Conferences On Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in 1969 was another important milestone in the development of Artificial Intelligence. It marks that the emerging subject of artificial intelligence has been recognized by the world.
After the concept of artificial intelligence was put forward, people used this concept to make breakthroughs, such as checkers program, so that the concept of artificial intelligence set off the first climax in popular media.
Development by Leaps and Bounds
Due to artificial intelligence early breakthroughs in development, in the 1960s, people began to try more unrealistic goals. However, the mathematical models and the mathematical methods had defects at the time, the computational complexity in degree of index increased, the artificial intelligence often failed at completing computing tasks. It appeared a barrage of failures, such as machine translation made what was meant be a joke an embarrassment for everyone.The Lighthill Report in 1973 pointed out that artificial intelligence did not achieve the expected results, which led to the first trough in the development of Artificial Intelligence.
In 1980, Carnegie Mellon built the "Expert System for Digital”. The rise of "expert system", which simulates the knowledge and experience of human experts to solve problems in specific fields, has realized the transformation of artificial intelligence from theoretical research to practical application. The success of expert system in medical treatment, chemistry and other fields has made artificial intelligence enter the second development climax.
In the mid - 1980 - s and nineties, with artificial intelligence scale expands unceasingly, the expert system’s difficulty in application field of narrow, knowledge acquisition and reasoning of a single problem gradually exposed. In 1987, expert system relied on LISP machine failure in business. Hence, expert system development—— Artificial intelligence had entered its second trough.
From the mid-1990s to 2010, the development of Internet technology accelerated the innovative research of artificial intelligence. From February 10 to 17, 1996, in order to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the birth of the world's first electronic computer, IBM paid a huge sum of money to invite the chess king Garry Kasparov and IBM's Deep Blue computer system to have a six-game "man-machine war”. Deep Blue finally won the remarkable man-machine war by an aggregate score of 3.5 to 2.5. Deep Blue's victory shows what AI has achieved. At this stage, artificial intelligence is further practical.
Since 2010, with the development of mobile Internet, big data and cloud computing, and the successful application of "deep learning" in Google's AlphaGo, AI has crossed the gap between science and application, realizing image classification, speech recognition, man-machine chess, knowledge question and answer, and unmanned driving, bringing a new upsurge of artificial intelligence.
II. The value and significance of AI
Promote enterprise technology innovation, realizing economic benefit
According to a domestic survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 63 percent of Americans say AI technology will have a positive impact on humanity. Some experts say that the emergence of AI has made humans more active. For example, in today's booming AI industry, many enterprises say they are under great pressure because the integration of their products with AI technology is like a threshold, and when enterprises cross this threshold, they will usher in new opportunities and growth. At the same time, all kinds of artificial intelligence equipment are applied to the work and production of enterprises, which saves labor force for enterprises, improves productivity by leaps and bounds, while achieving economic benefits.
Accomplish tasks in different areas instead of people
Computing power and big data make deep learning a successful application in AI, which enables AI to accomplish incredible tasks in many fields. Large amounts of data train deep learning models, and the more data provided, the more accurate they’d become. Artificial intelligence achieves incredible accuracy through deep neural networks. Baidu Search and Baidu Photo Albums, for example, are both based on deep learning and will become more accurate as we use them more and more. In medicine, AI technology from deep learning, image classification and object recognition can now be used to find cancer on MRI.
Improve people's recreational life, improve people's quality of life
The appearance of artificial intelligence has gradually upgraded people's recreational life. For example, today's image processing technology enriches human vision and combines human cultural life with artificial intelligence.In the film industry, the content and pictures become colorful due to the addition of AI. Artificial intelligence not only plays an obvious role in promoting the film industry, but also plays an active role in game development, literature creation and other fields, and uses artificial intelligence to apply rich thinking to the cultural industry.At the same time, the emergence of smart home, make people's life more convenient, improve the quality of life of people.
III. The future development trend of AI
What is the future of artificial intelligence?What sets the direction of the next generation of AI? It's hard to know for sure. But there are three directions that might be explored and discussed.
AI and humans will collaborate in all professions
According to technologist and futurist Ray Kurzweil, AI will reach human-level performance by 2030.AI will support employees' creative activities, generate new ideas and achieve innovations that were previously impossible.In medicine, for example, AI will improve the quality of care, and AI can learn about a person's genes, environment and lifestyle to help determine the best way to prevent or treat certain diseases. The continued interaction between human doctors and AI diagnostics will help improve the accuracy of these systems, and over time, humans will have enough confidence to let AI systems operate autonomously.All of this will help humans live longer, healthier lives.Then there's cybersecurity, where as machines take over more of people's lives, hacking and cybercrime inevitably become a bigger problem, and smart algorithms will play an increasing role in protecting humans from cyber security threats.
AI will become an important part of human daily life
AI's software will learn your preferences, predict your needs and behaviors, monitor your health, drive your car, and organize every aspect of your life.Applications such as unmanned driving, household robots and comprehensive smart home systems have made people's lives more comfortable and convenient.
Artificial intelligence will emerge in the realm of "ideas"
After creating poems and paintings, Microsoft Xiaoice even got a diploma from Shanghai Conservatory of Music.This heralds the emergence of AI in art, which is known for its creativity. It is worth noting that Google "brain" is one of the main Google X laboratory research projects, Google is developed in the field of artificial intelligence, a simulation of the human brain have self-learning function software, in GPT-4 Google "brain" and so on under the blessing of the new model, people can look forward to the artificial intelligence to provide more delicate, seemingly "natural" creative output. The creativity of AI will be embodied in article writing, picture creation, badge design and so on. AI technology has always been talked about, but emotional interaction and creativity are what these AI researchers dream of. Maybe in the future, we will see more emotion and creativity on these machines.