The story of Artificial Intelligence is the story of human aspiration, and equally, of human hubris. You see, we like to think of ourselves as capable

The One Percent Rule

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2024-11-28 14:30:40

The story of Artificial Intelligence is the story of human aspiration, and equally, of human hubris. You see, we like to think of ourselves as capable of building anything, especially something that can think. Or replicate the human brain. And maybe, just maybe, we can. But before we leap onto the altar of technological worship, it might be prudent to ask, what exactly are we building, and for whose benefit?

AI, much like us, has had its phases. A quaint infancy in the 1940s and 1950s, marked by aspirations of reasoning like a human, a rebellious adolescence in the 1980s with statistical flamboyance, and now, a kind of awkward teenage dominance filled with deep learning and generative models, the AI equivalent of growing taller than all its parents but still unsure what to do with its lanky limbs (e.g. Trurl’s Machine). The road to this point has been paved with bold promises, from machines playing games to agents generating complex visual art, and yet, alongside every breakthrough has been a series of troubling questions left unanswered.

Where did this journey begin? Let’s time-travel to the 1940’s where a young Alan Turing’s ideas of computability merged with the Martian brain of John von Neumann, then we move quickly to the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College, and the more pragmatic proposals of John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky created a rallying cry for a new kind of science. They called it artificial intelligence. Here were the big questions, how do you make machines reason, plan, understand language, learn? Could machines one day even reflect?