Machine and Human Awareness

In the last few years we have been experiencing a rise in fascination and enthusiasm for the understanding and development of Intelligent Machines. This has been result of Human curiosity through a long process of scientific discoveries, trials and errors and cold winters in between.

The concept of artificial beings that can think, have been part of mankind’s literature since ancient times. However the first idea of building a machine that can reason, probably belongs to Ramon Lull(XII), who attempted to device a machine that used logical means to produce knowledge . He was specifically trying to show that christianity and its doctrines could be obtained from an initial set of ideas. – He wasn’t very successful at that.

Many more years, and people came by, to put their grain of support from different thought and scientific fields, and helped developed our concepts of Logic, Reasoning, Information and Computation. Including Masterminds such as Alan Turing and Wilhelm Schickard.

Getting Now to the second part of the XX century, The field of Artificial Intelligence was born at Darmouth College in 1956 . It has 6 fathers. John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, Arthur Samuel and Herbert Simon.

“Every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.”

– Darmouth Conference Conjecture.

The Artificial Intelligence project has a series of goals or challenges:

1. Reasoning
2. Knowledge
3. Planning
4. Learning
5. Communicating
6. Perception & Movement

If solved and achieved, the union of the systems will in theory take us to the creation of an Artificial General Intelligence.

What is Artificial General Intelligence? That will be a topic for a future post. However and just to write a main idea.

It is an artificial autonomous system, that is able to learn, understand, self-program, and self replicate.

In Short the next step in the evolution of life in the universe.