- Back in 1955, Dartmouth Professor John McCarthy
coined the term artificial intelligence.
He created the term as part of an academic grant
to fund the first AI workshop.
This workshop was to see if early computers
could behave in ways that everyday people
would identify as intelligent.
In the early 1950s, single computers
were taking up entire floors.
Even with their enormous size,
they had much less processing power
than modern smartphones.
So they didn't make much progress
creating a fully intelligent artificial person.
What they did do was create a new term
that ignited everyone's imagination.
The term, artificial intelligence, inspired a new generation
of journalists, writers, academics, and computer scientists.
It opened the door to large grants
that early computer scientists
used to build out a whole new area of research.
In fact, there's a good chance that if Professor McCarthy
had come up with a different name,
this 1955 workshop would have faded into memory.
Artificial intelligence as a technology is any system
that exhibits behavior that could be interpreted
as human intelligence.
But this simple definition cuts to the very heart
of one of the big challenges in AI.
How do you define human intelligence?
There are many different forms of human intelligence.
Many great artists are terrible mathematicians.
On the flip side, many great mathematicians
are terrible artists.
Yet, they can each be super intelligent in their own field.
There's no one standard for human intelligence.
That makes it very difficult to point to a computer and say
that it's intelligent.
There are certainly some things that computers
are very good at.
In fact, there are many tasks
where they're much better than humans.
A computer has been able to beat humans
in chess for decades.
IBM Watson beat some of the best champions
in the game show Jeopardy.
Google's DeepMind has beaten the best players
in the 2,500-year-old Chinese game called Go,
a game that's so complex
that there's thought to be more than twice
as many possible game scenarios
as there are atoms in the universe.
As good as they are, none of these computers
understand the purpose of a game
or even why they're playing.
They're simply flexing their special talent
of following rules and pattern matching.
So how can a system that's so intelligent
also be equally unaware of the concept of a game
or even its own ability?
The main challenge is that computer intelligence
and human intelligence act in very different ways.
This is seen as intelligent behavior,
only because computers can be so much better
than any human in identifying
and matching different patterns.
That means when a computer is doing something
that it's really good at,
it's much easier to think of this skill as intelligence.
In many ways, a game is a perfect environment
for a computer.
It has set rules with a certain amount of possibilities.
When IBM's Watson played Jeopardy,
it used natural language processing
to understand the question.
Then it used pattern matching to check its database
for a possible answer.
Think about the chess program
that can beat even the best humans.
It was only a few years after the first AI workshop
that computer scientists played their first version
of a chess program.
Even those early computers could thrive in a world
of set rules and possibilities.
They could match players' moves
with patterns of possible countermoves.
A computer could play out many thousands of scenarios
before its opponent even reached across the board.
That's why artificial intelligence
will always seem more impressive
when computers are on their home turf.
The first organization that will get the most benefit
from AI will be the ones that work
within a well-defined space
with set rules.
It's no surprise that organizations, like Google,
are fully embracing artificial intelligence.
Their whole business is about pattern matching.
They match your questions against their massive database
of possible answers.
Because we're humans, we don't think about certain tasks
the same way that a computer would.
So if you're considering whether AI
will have an impact on your organization,
try to think about the things
that computers are really good at.
Do you have a lot of pattern matching in your organization?
Does a lot of your work have set rules and possibilities?
It'll be this work that will be the first to benefit
from artificial intelligence.