From where did AI originate?

The buzzwords of this current 21st Digital Era among Industrial Automation, Deep Space Exploration, Quest to know more about extraterrestrial beings and finally there comes Data Science which is something we use every single day with or without our knowledge.

Yeah you read it right, Data Science, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence they all come under one roof if we want to categorise the. The fundamental concepts that empower these powerful technologies are same just their application and the scale at which they are deployed differentiates them. When you finish reading this post I won't guarantee that you are going to be an expert in Artificial Intelligence, but something which I could promise is this that you will get to know the roots of Artificial Intelligence that is where it all began and if you think that it began a decade ago, then I would definitely recommend you to read the complete post.

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Generally AI is all about making machines learn. The idea originated back since 1950's.

An AI (not exactly AI but a machine that adapts itself) model that learned to play checkers, with the ability to adapt and learn from users moves and could beat an amateur, was developed in 1955. John McCarthy from Massachusetts Institute Of Technology invented the LISP (List Processing) Programming which was the first ever AI program ever created by humans in 1958.

Followed by that a series of innovations and optimisation of existing learning algorithms and invention of new algorithms to meet the demands changed the way humans looked at AI then on. Autonomous driving systems which was considered nearly impossible was being tested and implemented by Carnegie Mellon University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology by 1990's. And they even succeeded in making a car drive from the west coast to the east coast autonomously through the highways cruising at around 120 KPH on average, with very little human intervention in between, considering the safety aspects of the public. The project was named as 'No Hands Across America'.

Once upon a time the world was driven by Oil, and countries producing oil were kingpins because it was required to make the industries run across the globe. And industries back then were a major portion of a governments income. Production of millions of barrels of crude oil across the globe helped in making humans transition from Industrial Revolution 1.0 to Industrial Revolution 3.0, today as you are reading this we are in Industrial Revolution 4.0, where not only mechanical machines contribute to the stability of the industry but computers have also taken a major position to make production possible with precision and efficiency. And computers just didn't stop at mechanical industries, with the invention of smartphones and smart gadgets they have surrounded us without our knowledge.

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Artificial Intelligence was not just created alone by engineers, mathematicians and scientists but a significant role was also played by biologists to improve the learning models.

The reason why I mentioned biology here is because humans are themselves a machine, we just need to change the way we think about it to realise it. Let's take an example. There is a small child which is new to this world and learning things on its own. If the child takes its hand close to fire the mind notices that it gives pain in some form and the child retracts its hand from the fire, so brain instantly learns that any object with light around it could be hot and we should not touch it. This method is called as TRIAL AND ERROR. Where trials are made and errors are noted, and we ensure that we don't commit those same mistakes again. The same algorithm applies when we first learn to ride a bicycle, we fall and learn from our mistakes and ensure that we are not doing that again.

This same logic is called as Reinforcement Learning in Artificial Intelligence terminology which lays the foundation for the existence of autonomous driving systems and many such complex models out there. But if one expects on a ground level regarding how the mind learns, then that is where the concept of NEURONS comes into the equation. Our brain have billions of neurons which passes one information from another. The same approach is involved in building sophisticated neural networks to solve complex problems using AI like face recognition, speech recognition, object recognition and many more.

Today when we are browsing on social Media or watching YouTube videos or googling about some thing, we all are using Artificial Intelligence in one or the other form with or without our knowledge. The only thing that we can do is accept this transition and move on ahead with technology. Once again it has its own pro's and con's but at the end of the day it depends on who uses it and what are his or her intentions to deploy an AI model.

So finally the place from where AI originated is our own BRAIN folks !