By Mark Davidson

For most people the term "Artificial Intelligence" conjures up images from movies. The menacing killer robots from The Terminator or perhaps something more subtle and sinister like HAL from 2001. Definitely entertaining and thought provoking but the concepts covered are more science fiction than science.

More recently, there appears to be interest in the field based on books written by experts mostly in a despondent tone. Several years ago, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and dozens of other AI experts were signatories on an open letter calling for research on the societal impacts of AI and raised concerns about the existential threat that AI has on humanity.

Why is there such interest in AI and how is it really impacting our life? In this series, I want to present a more optimistic view of AI that could benefit us rather than destroy us. But first I want to take a look at the fascinating history of AI which goes back a long way to the beginning of modern computing.

We start our history lesson with the English Mathematician Alan Turing. Turing is a pivotal character in the development in modern computer science. In the 1930s he laid the theoretical concepts of computer science through the formalization of algorithms and computation known as the Turing Machine.  He helped with the British war effort during World War II as a cryptographer and helped to decode German communications. In the 1950s he was persecuted for his homosexuality but was issued a posthumous pardon by the British Government in 2013. Alan Turing was one of the first to postulate, “Can a machine think?”

He developed The Turing Test which is a simple test to determine if a human can detect if a computer is acting like a human in conversation. In modern times, we have achieved various levels of success in the development of chatbots or “socialbots” for technical support and other purposes. After interacting with one for a few minutes you can clearly ascertain that it’s not intelligent. Today, Amazon is continuing the Turing test legacy by sponsoring the $1,000,000 Alexa Prize - in which a socialbot must have a natural conversation for 20 minutes with the judges.

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