Advances in intelligent information technology: re-branding or progress towards conscious machines?
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Debates and perspectives
Advances in intelligent information technology: re-branding or progress towards conscious machines? Igor Aleksander1,2 1
Emeritus Professor of Neural Systems Engineering and Leverhulme Fellow, Imperial College, London SW7 2BT, UK; Visiting Research Fellow in Informatics, University of Sussex, UK
2
Correspondence: I Aleksander, Emeritus Professor of Neural Systems Engineering, Imperial College, London SW7 2BT, UK. Tel: þ 44 207 594 6176; Fax: þ 44 207 594 6274; E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract Is artificial intelligence (AI) just something that is done in laboratories disconnected from the development of the pragmatic computing, which constitutes current information technology or does it contribute to progress in computing and information technology? It has even been suggested that advances in AI are merely a re-branding exercise for promises that are rarely kept. This paper is a personal view of the forces that have driven the development of AI in the past and what might be a serious paradigm shift in the future. The latter points to what appears to be the most abstruse corner of the subject: the modelling of the human brain and the possibility of designing systems with the brain’s ability to create conscious thought. There have been accusations that AI is always ahead on promise and behind on delivery. This is an inaccurate view. In broad terms, the argument presented here suggests that as AI developed, progress was achieved by overcoming unforeseen difficulties in the pursuit of very ambitious targets , not just a re-branding of promises. This process not only advanced AI but also fed into the mainstream of computing that underpins the information technology of the present time. While the outcome of the paradigm shift towards conscious machines, which is examined at the end of this paper is still unclear, it is possible to speculate how information technology might be affected in the future. Journal of Information Technology (2004) 19, 21–27. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jit.2000001 Keywords: artificial intelligence; history of technology; conscious machines; computational intelligence
What are computers for? omputer pioneers of the 1940s would have been astonished to learn that their efforts to build fast, automatic calculating engines would, less than 60 years later, be used to write messages, draw pictures and transmit information all over the world by means of telephone lines. Even the ability of managers to get benefit for their organizations through having data about their firms at their fingertips would have surprised the likes of Vannevar Bush and John von Neumann in the US, and David Hartree and Tom Kilburn in the UK without whom the computer as we know it may not have come into existence. They saw their task as producing engines that would perform the most intricate calculations as fast as possible. What has this to do with artificial intelligence (AI)?
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