By: Daron Acemoglu, MIT & Pascual Restrepo, Boston University
AI as a Technological PlatformHuman (or natural) intelligence comprises several different types of mental activities. These include, among others, simple computation, data processing, pattern recognition, prediction, hand-eye coordination, various types of problem solving, judgment, creativity, and communication. Early AI, pioneered in the 1950s by researchers from computer science, psychology and economics, such as Marvin Minsky, Seymour Papert, John McCarthy, Herbert Simon and Allen Newell, aimed at developing machine intelligence capable of performing all of these different types of mental activities.2. The goal was nothing short of creating truly intelligent machines.
Herbert Simon, for example, claimed in 1958 “there are now in the world machines that think, that learn and that create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until – in a visible future – the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied.”