History of AI - Phase 1
History of AI - Phase 1
History of AI - Phase 1
In this era, AI researchers gave up on the goal of developing Based on the answers of the doctor, the expert system then
a general or strong AI and instead focused on developing makes a deduction such as: The patient is most likely to have
systems that were designed to be useful for very narrow Covid-19.
and specific problems. They argued that often we perceive
those humans as intelligent that possess a lot of (expert) However, above and beyond a few useful applications in very
knowledge that they can use in a sensible way to make narrow domains (such as medical diagnosis), the knowledge-
reasonable decisions. Thus, proponents of the new paradigm based approaches to AI failed for two key reasons. First, there
noted that the old paradigm was missing two key ingredients is the knowledge elicitation problem: Human experts find it
to truly emulate the human mind: “knowledge” and routinely hard to articulate their expertise (they do not know
“reasoning.” what rules they follow); and if they do, they often have no
desire to tell someone else. Moreover, the moment you try
To add these two ingredients, AI researchers of that era to make applicability of the system a bit broader, you need
worked on two techniques: First, “knowledge representation” to feed it with very basic common-sense knowledge. Things
to formally capture human knowledge in a machine-readable like: Patients are humans. Humans live in houses. Different
way. Here is an example of such a knowledge representation houses have different ventilation, etc. This is an enormous
technique for a disease you have become all too familiar and very difficult undertaking because it requires us to make
with. This—so called—ontology captures (among others) all things explicit that we ‘just know’ and take for granted. The
the known symptoms of Covid-19 in a way that is accessible second key obstacle faced by knowledge-based AI is the
to machines. fact that the real world is ‘fuzzy’, i.e., full of ambiguity and
contradictions rendering logical deduction often difficult or
even impossible.
era of Behavioral AI
By the 1980s, symbolic AI had advanced a variety of
different techniques and approaches—but all of them
seemed to lead to dead ends. Accordingly, the “Era of
Behavioral AI” emerged in strong opposition to earlier AI
research.. It criticized knowledge-based AI for its one-sided
emphasis on higher-level cognitive functions (such as logic
reasoning and expert knowledge) and the AI of the “golden
age” for its reliance on unrealistic simulations.
The new “behavioral paradigm” instead put forward the vision Agent-based AI
that in order for a system to show intelligent behaviors in
real-world settings, we need to build it from bottom-up. As behavioral AI tested out and reached its limits, the
According to this view, complex behaviors emerge from the agent-based paradigm began to emerge in the mid 90s.)
interaction of very simple component behaviors that are
adaptively (re-) combined to react to the environment. This This new paradigm combined behavioral and reasoning
is different from the idea pursued in the golden age, which approaches: From the “golden age”, it took the idea
was all about creating highly complex individual component that proactive behaviors such as planning and problem
behaviors such as “perception” or “problem solving.” By solving are essential. From the behavioral approach, that
contrast, the behavioral paradigm sought to break down reactiveness to the environment is key. This resulted in the
‘hands-on’, real-world tasks such as “vacuum cleaning” into development of “software agents”, i.e., software programs
simple basic behaviors such as “walk randomly”, “avoid that act on behalf of the user. To qualify as ‘intelligent’,
obstacles”, and “vacuum” and then try to make them work software agents do not have to make choices the way the
together as a system that attunes to its environment. human mind does, instead, they have to make choices that
are ‘economically rational.’ Accordingly, software agents try
This approach resulted in a couple of breakthrough robotic to maximize expected utility on behalf of the user building
applications—of which iRobot‘s vacuum cleaners are on a utility function that represents the needs of that user.
arguably the most prominent example. It showed that Software agents take an active role in collaborating with their
for some problems “intelligent” machines can be built users trying to guide them towards utility maximization.
from simple behaviors—without any need for higher-level
cognitive functions. The agent-based paradigm led to a wealth of practically
useful applications. A major breakthrough was the chess
However, this approach only worked when just a few basic program “Deep Blue” that beat the reigning chess world
behaviors had to be combined to show the more complex champion. This was remarkable because chess is an
behavior. For the successful completion of tasks that require intractable problem that suffers from complexity explosion—
a large number of basic behaviors it becomes increasingly the phenomenon that had led to the downfall of symbolic
difficult to understand their interaction and fine-tune the AI. In fact, today software agents are at the core of reusable
overall system. Moreover, while the emulation of higher-level software tools—so called SAT solvers—that can be used to
cognitive functions is not necessary for tasks like vacuum provide good solutions to most intractable problems in a
cleaning, there are other tasks that clearly benefit from reasonable amount of time.
reason and rationality—and for those tasks the behavioral
paradigm proved limited.
So, what can we learn from this history of AI for the present
day and the future? Over the past 70 years, the field of AI
has grown from a niche-y and obscure academic discipline
that was unable to produce anything of practical usefulness
to one of the most vibrant areas of technological progress,
powering sophisticated applications that we now use
every day. However, we also learn that this progress did
Era of Machine Learning not develop linearly. Periods of unbridled optimism and
major leaps forward were punctuated by periods of bitter
The breakthrough ingredient heralding the current “Era of disappointments when AI seemed to have reached another
Machine Learning” —but introduce right column step- dead end. So, we should not be surprised when in a few
wise), was an idea called ‘deep learning.‘ The possibility that years from now, we find ourselves in a situation in which
machines—just like humans—could learn from data and the current excitement around AI has faded away and
experience, had intrigued machine learning researchers for technological progress seemingly comes to a halt. Yet, even
decades. The key technique they had invented to address if this happens, its history suggests that the field of AI has
this problem were called “Artificial Neural Networks” or a remarkable ability to overcome obstacles. So, my guess is
“neural nets.” This technique was not inspired by the human that it will be here to stay. So with this in mind, I invite you
mind but by the human brain. It tried to emulate the to dig deeper into our next series of videos that will introduce
biological neural networks that populate our brains. you to the foundational technologies of modern AI and their
intimate relationship with data.