24
Looking at the emergence of new technologies today, most of which are like complete foreign languages to the users (myself included) or simply running in the background, as electricity does. We all use them but have no idea how they exist and run. How we got here? From the simple counting of the caveman to today's predictive AI technologies, I tried to have a look back in time and will outline my findings bellow.
For many years before modern times people were trying to understand the hidden meaning in large amounts of data. An example that comes to mind is the way how great gardeners looked at large royal spaces and planned the divine French gardens that all important people wanted to have in their backyard. Looking at a large space and counting how many trees, flowers, and decorative bushes can be planted is one thing but deciding how to arrange, delimit them by form, altitude, taking into consideration various factors like: seasons of blooming, colours, species is another story and here more understanding, analysing of data is needed.
Resembling to a dark matter of data Universe, this unstructured data has to be somehow made sense of, so over time people have created different calculating machines. Old calculus machines resemble today's counting with beads devices used by kindergartners. The old abacus counting device made of wires and beads helped the Emperor predict how much to spend on building the Great Wall of China, 2000 years ago.
During 1800s there was an attempt to build a device that could handle complex calculations with logarithms and trigonometry, a difference counting engine.
By 1900s IBM started using machine tabulating devices to analyze census numbers for entire country populations and went beyond counting people, they identified patterns within the behavior of certain populations, how they moved, earned their living, or about health problems. These data were then used by state to better understand the people's needs and serve them better. During these times, we can think of this as the Tabulation Era.
The troubles that WW II brought triggered a new approach to analyzing data: the Era of Programming, with ENIAC that helped predict attacks, calculate artillery firing tables for US Army and even secretly testing the possibility of thermonulear weapons. These were times of great progress, programs and computers driving and guiding the man to the moon during Appolo mission.
These times put the basis of our newest technologies today, what drives our phones, smart devices and ultimately the emergence of narrow followed by general, then broader AI systems. People always had a curiosity about the surrounding world, leading to discussions and ideas about the possibilities with technologies.
When AI started? It all started one summer morning in 1956
John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky gathered at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, one of the oldest colleges in US and revolutionesed scientific research coining the term " artificial intelligence " bringing forth the idea that anything characterized by intelligence can be detailed and precisely described to a machine, so that the machine can learn or be made to simulate that intelligence or characteristic of intelligence. This was a vision called " artificial intelligence ".
In next 20 years a lot of things were accomplished, machines that could describe and prove mathematical theorems, speak simple language and solve algebra problems. Those were exciting times in AI history, followed by a stagnation period or winter season if we prefer. That period was due to lack of money invested in these new technologies, during the 1970s it was clear that advancing was not possible without storage and sufficient money to support the calculating power.
Following was the AI s so-called second winter
The progress of AI will be presented at a next post, leaving today's post to be continued with my next #retroFriday article.
(this article was drafted on Monday and took around 4-5 days to finalize, today is just posted).
Wishing you all warm and lovely December days ahead, in health and happiness
