00:00For the last several years, it's felt impossible to avoid hearing about AI.
00:08Sometimes it's utopian promises of how it's going to make all of our lives easier.
00:11I think it'd be good to end poverty.
00:13Maybe we should stop a technology that can do that.
00:15I personally don't.
00:16Other times, it's fear of lost jobs, the spread of disinformation, and even apocalyptic scenarios
00:22brought about by these all-knowing machines.
00:24The creation of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued
00:30existence of humanity.
00:31It has the potential of a civilizational destruction.
00:35But the last few years of rapid advancement in AI technology aren't the only time in history
00:39that computer intelligence has kept for attention.
00:41I'm sorry, Dave.
00:42I'm afraid I can't do that.
00:43Back in the 1950s and 60s, improving computer technology stoked fears that sound really
00:49similar to what we hear today.
00:51Sixty years ago, as computers learned how to write music and even win games of checkers,
00:55what did people think that artificial intelligence would be capable of?
00:58We dived into Fortune's archives to find out.
01:08Let's go back to 1964.
01:12The moon landing is still five years away and computers fill up entire rooms.
01:17But the technology and its capabilities have steadily evolved since the 1940s.
01:21The term artificial intelligence was created by John McCarthy, a computer scientist and
01:25professor at Dartmouth College who organized a now historic workshop on the topic in 1956.
01:32And by the mid-1960s, computers were capable of playing games of checkers, making music,
01:37answering simple questions about baseball teams, naming shapes, and recognizing voices.
01:42In the midst of all this progress, the public's perception of artificial intelligence drove
01:46fears of mass unemployment and concerns over computers' ability to produce art and make
01:50decisions more efficiently than the humans that built them.
01:53And while this conversation played out in American discourse, Fortune's Gilbert Burke
01:56spoke with prominent computer scientists and researchers to get an inside look at their
02:00predictions on how AI would impact the future, sharing his findings in 1964 with one simple
02:06question.
02:07Will the computer outwit man?
02:16Throughout his conversations, Burke heard a wide array of opinions concerning what computers
02:20would be able to do in the following decades.
02:22And some were very optimistic about how quickly artificial intelligence would reach major
02:26advancements.
02:27For example, Herbert Simon, a researcher at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, predicted
02:32back in 1957 that within 10 years, a computer would be crowned the world's chess champion
02:37that it would discover an important new mathematical theorem, and that it would write music of
02:41aesthetic value.
02:43Contrary to these predictions, it took exactly 40 years, not 10, for a computer to beat a
02:48chess champion.
02:49And a computer was first used to help prove the mathematical theorem in 1976, nearly 20
02:54years after the prediction.
02:55And although the first music composed by a computer was scored a year earlier in 1956,
03:00Burke stated that one of the moderate remarks about it is that repeated hearings tend to
03:04induce exasperation.
03:09Another expert with very hopeful predictions for artificial intelligence was Marvin Minsky,
03:13an influential early AI researcher who worked at MIT.
03:17Burke said that Minsky believed we were close to the threshold of an era that will quite
03:21possibly be dominated by intelligent problem-solving machines.
03:25Minsky also said that in 10 years, we may have something with which we can carry on
03:29a reasonable conversation.
03:30He even thought that if scientists work hard enough, they may have it in five.
03:34Well, Minsky turned out to have underestimated just how hard his colleagues were working.
03:39Just two years later, in 1966, ELIZA, the first computer chatbot, was unveiled by a
03:44fellow MIT computer scientist, Joseph Weizenbaum.
03:48ELIZA's programming was modeled after a form of psychology called Rogerian psychotherapy,
03:53meaning that it would rephrase what it was told into a question as a response.
03:57Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
03:59Your boyfriend made you come here?
04:01He says I'm depressed much of the time.
04:04I am sorry to hear that you are depressed.
04:06Weizenbaum's original intention was to demonstrate the shallow limits of a computer's ability
04:10to hold a conversation by essentially just having it repeat words back to users.
04:15But in a twist fit for a science fiction novel, users lost themselves in conversation with
04:20ELIZA, sharing very private thoughts with the one-dimensional computer, and resulting
04:23in what we now call the ELIZA effect.
04:26As a result, Weizenbaum changed his views on artificial intelligence and dedicated the
04:30rest of his career to criticizing the continued adoption of computer technology.
04:40But getting back to his article, Burke also heard from other experts who were a little
04:43more moderate in their predictions for AI.
04:46One was Arthur Samuel, a consultant to IBM's director of research and the originator of
04:50the term machine learning.
04:52In the 1950s, Samuel had successfully programmed a computer to learn how to play checkers and
04:57published his findings in 1959.
05:00But even after these accomplishments, Samuel was still a little skeptical about the computer's
05:04ability to surpass the human brain.
05:06Burke wrote,
05:07The limitations of the computer, Samuel likes to put it, are not in the machine but in man.
05:12To make machines that appear to be smarter than man, man himself must be smarter than
05:17the machine.
05:18Researchers had been attempting to build computers as complex as the human brain for years at
05:21this point.
05:22Burke noted that some experts he talked to thought the task would be way too expensive,
05:26saying,
05:27The total cost of duplicating all the brain cells and connections would come to more than
05:30one quintillion dollars, or one billion billion dollars.
05:35And that's in 1964 dollars.
05:37But despite the fact that computers are a fraction of the cost they were back in 1964,
05:41which has allowed computer technology to increase dramatically as a result, open AI is still
05:46looking for more computing power and a lot of money to continue improving their AI products.
05:52And Burke even shared his own thoughts about a computer's ability to generate new ideas,
05:55similar to a human brain, stating,
05:57Nobody has yet been able to program the machine to imitate what many competent judges would
06:01call true creativity.
06:03The computer's achievements in creative composition, literary and musical, are remarkable in the
06:07sense that Dr. Johnson's dog could walk on his hind legs was remarkable.
06:11It has not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.
06:16Coming back to the current day, it's clear that AI has evolved in a much different way
06:25than some of these computer scientists expected.
06:28Computers are so advanced that they're driving cars around cities and delivering takeout
06:31to hungry college students.
06:33Many of those optimistic expectations from Herbert Simon, along with those of his colleague
06:37Albert Newell, ended up coming true over the last 60 years.
06:41Their thoughts on a computer's ability to generate art are especially insightful, with
06:45the rapid advancement in text, music, image, and video generators we've seen since the
06:50late 2010s.
06:51Burke cited the duo as claiming,
06:53The computer on its own could not just copy but match such creations as a Beethoven symphony,
06:58crime and punishment, or a Cezanne landscape.
07:01It's true.
07:02AI technology is not only capable of writing books and making music.
07:06The technology can now make photorealistic images and even video.
07:10But something is still a little bit... off.
07:14Regardless, as the public perception of artificial intelligence shifts, and the economic threats
07:19and ethical concerns surrounding the tech seem to become more and more real, we're left
07:23with Burke's somewhat foreboding words from 1964,
07:27The computer is here to stay.
07:29It cannot be shelved any more than the telescope or the steam engine could have been shelved.
07:34Precisely because man is so arduously trying to imitate the behavior of human beings in
07:38the computer, he is bound to improve enormously his understanding of both himself and the
07:43machine.
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