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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE:

BETWEEN

MYTH & REALITY

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). We will not discuss this
FEATURE says Jean-Gabriel Ganascia: this is a myth inspired by science be ascribed to a fertile imagination, inspired more by science
second meaning here, because at least for now, it can only
Are machines likely to become smarter than humans? No,
fiction. The computer scientist walks us through the major
fiction than by any tangible scientific reality confirmed by
experiments and empirical observations. For McCarthy, Minsky,
milestones in artificial intelligence (AI), reviews the most recent
and the other researchers of the Dartmouth Summer Research
technical advances, and discusses the ethical questions that
require increasingly urgent answers. A scientific discipline, AI
officially began in 1956, during a summer workshop organized
simulate each of the different faculties of intelligence – human,
by four American researchers – John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Project on Artificial Intelligence, AI was initially intended to
animal, plant, social or phylogenetic – using machines
Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon – at Dartmouth
College in New Hampshire, United States. Since then, the term More precisely, this scientific discipline was based on the
“artificial intelligence”, probably first coined to create a striking conjecture that all cognitive functions – especially learning,
impact, has become so popular that today everyone has heard reasoning, computation, perception, memorization, and even
of it. This application of computer science has continued to scientific discovery or artistic creativity – can be described
expand over the years, and the technologies it has spawned with such precision that it would be possible to programme a
have contributed greatly to changing the world over the past computer to reproduce them. In the more than sixty years that
sixty years. AI has existed, there has been nothing to disprove or irrefutably
prove this conjecture, which remains both open and full of
However, the success of the term AI is sometimes based on potential.
a misunderstanding, when it is used to refer to an artificial
entity endowed with intelligence and which, as a result, would Uneven progress
compete with human beings. In the course of its short existence, AI has undergone many
changes. These can be summarized in six stages.
This idea, which refers to ancient myths and legends, like that
of the golem [from Jewish folklore, an image endowed with The time of the prophets
life], have recently been revived by contemporary personalities First of all, in the euphoria of AI’s origins and early successes, the
including the British physicist Stephen Hawking (1942-2018), researchers had given free range to their imagination, indulging
American entrepreneur Elon Musk, American futurist Ray in certain reckless pronouncements for which they were heavily
Kurzweil, and proponents of what we now call Strong AI or criticized later.

CB2, an infant robot, was
built by Minoru Asada, Japan,
who wanted to understand
how robots learn. Here,
CB2 is being taught to crawl.
© Max Aguilera-Hellweg /
INSTITUTE
28 W.A.D Beyond Global