Blog 2: Thoughts on AI presentation

In last week's class, we discussed Artificial Intelligence and how it has advanced at a rapid pace. We discussed the concerns raised by Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Steve Hawking. Gates' concerns about AI is about job displacement, deep fakes, and cyberattacks.  While he agrees that AI has certain benefits. Musk’s concerns are about ethical dilemmas, privacy, and loss of control. Hawking's concerns are about the machines ‘taking off’ on their own and modifying themselves. We also talked about Alan Turing who is widely considered the ‘father of AI’. He proposed the ‘Turing Test’ which is a method that determines whether a machine can demonstrate human intelligence. It was proposed in 1950. There have been several variations of this test such as a gender-neutral version, a version with an interrogator and one participant, and Viva voce.  Throughout the past couple of decades, there have been periods of great decline in AI which are known as ‘AI winter’. In the ‘70s and 80’s funding for AI dried up because there was a lack of computing power and breakthroughs. This led to the government and businesses pulling their funding.

However, in recent years, there has been an incredible boom in AI with things such as machine learning, neural networks, and natural language processing. There have also been systems such as SOPHIA (created in 2016) which is a humanoid robot that can interact with people and display human-like expressions. There also have been companies like Tesla using AI to create autonomous cars and humanoid robots.