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| Kismet the AI Robot at the MIT Museum, photo by Chris Devers, used under Creative Commons License |
Artificial Intelligence (or AI) is defined as intelligence exhibited by a machine, specifically a computer-driven device.
In popular culture, artificial intelligence is often depicted negatively. Recall the computer HAL in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. While HAL appears benevolent at first, taking care of the spaceship’s functions and playing chess with its human travellers, eventually the computer turns evil and seeks to kill the astronauts after discovering they are having doubts about HAL’s reliability and are planning to disable him.
Many other intelligent machines and robots, some nasty, some nice, figure in movies such as The Terminator, The Matrix, Aliens, and back in the 50s The Day the Earth Stood Still. And science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick and many others have explored the implications of intelligent machines as well.
Still, such machines, with true cognitive ability and rational decision making ability, and what might be understood as consciousness or self-awareness, have not yet been invented. In fact, a debate has raged for decades as to how to actually determine whether a computer is intelligent. Most of the methods proposed are variations on the well-known Turing Test, proposed in 1950 by the Enigma code-breaking mathematician, Alan Turing. Turing proposed a test in which an evaluator interviews two entities, a human and a computer in such a way that he can not see them, and receives answers only as text. In Turing’s original formulation, if, after a five minute conversation with each entity, the evaluator can not tell the human from the computer 70 percent of the time, the computer is judged to be intelligent.
