On the Development of AI in Germany
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On the Development of AI in Germany Wolfgang Bibel1 Received: 27 December 2019 / Accepted: 25 March 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The article gives a brief account of the historical evolution of Artificial Intelligence in Germany, covering key steps from antiquity to the present state of the discipline. Its focus is on AI as a science and on organisational aspects rather than on technological ones or on specific AI subjects. Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is on everyone’s lips today. Not in my wildest dreams could I have imagined this when I began to familiarize myself with this field more than 50 years ago in Munich. As far as I know—and otherwise I should actually know—I am the oldest living scientist in Germany who was already doing research in AI at that time, i.e. before 1970. To avoid discrepancies in the reader’s and my conceptions about the term AI, let me first explain what I mean by it. In a rough classification, the world seems to consist of three clearly distinguishable phenomena: physical, biological and informational/psychological/intelligent (IPsI). Accordingly, there are three natural sciences representative of these phenomena: Physics, Biology and IPsI science [7, 8]. For each of these there is a cluster of more specific sciences closely related to the representative one, such as Chemistry belonging to the Physics cluster and dealing with specific physical phenomena, viz. the chemical ones. What I call IPsI science here did not exist as a natural science until the middle of the last century, because the material to be studied was not tangible or visible, ie. not accessible by experimental means. Although you may be able to read a person’s anger from his or her face or behavior, it is not possible to grasp the phenomenon anger as such and in all its many aspects in this way. The same applies to intelligent performance in humans and also in animals or plants. It was only by way of the development of the universal computer in the middle of the last century that such phenomena became formalizable and manipulable and, as a result, experiments in this area became possible. This is how an IPsI natural science * Wolfgang Bibel [email protected] 1
in the true sense of the word could emerge in the first place, since experiments validating theories are indispensable ingredients of any natural science. The value of any science is undisputable since only through a deeper and firmly grounded understanding can we reach a better world. The credit for this historically unique scientific innovation undoubtedly goes to the founders of Artificial Intelligence (AI), who from the beginning had an IPsI science in this general sense in mind [21]. For these reasons, I understand AI in this general sense as a representative natural science, here for clarification also called IPsI science, and only secondarily as a technology resulting from this scientific discipline, namely the extremely rich and promising AI technology. Accordingly, the focus of this note is on AI as a science rather than on the technolog
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