John Taiwo

Artificial intelligence chatbots, particularly Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT), have become social properties in the possession of a vast majority of 21st century students. Although artificial intelligence is not limited to chatbots as it encompasses other areas of computer imitating human intelligence, an average student today has quite a number of  chatbots with which assignments and research are carried out. Leaving out the subject of the possible danger of people opting for “Machines that think” at the detriment of their “giant brains” in respect to problem-solving ability, due consideration of the subject of artificial intelligence: its ascendency and revolution is important.

Artificial intelligence is a specialty in computer science primarily aimed at the recreation of human intelligence in computers. The widespread development which has earned artificial intelligence its prominence in the 21st century can be traced to as far back as ancient time when scientists invented “automatons” –programmed mechanical objects which operated without human intervention. Also, publications on the possibilities of creating human machines by philosophers and scientists can be attributed to the ascendency of artificial intelligence.

About the first half of the 20th century (1900-1950), publications aimed at addressing the possibilities of creating artificially intelligent systems that could imitate humans problem solving skills were pervasive in the media. While the questions about the possibilities went on, experiments were also carried out to instantiate the scientists assumptions. By the year 1921, Karel Capek, a Czech playwright released “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” a science fiction in which artificial humans called robots featured. Besides, the first Japanese robot was built by  a Japanese professor, Makoto Nishimura in 1929. Another major stride in the pursuit of artificial intelligence was the publication of the book: “Giant Brains or Machines that Think ” by American computer scientist, Edmund Callis Berkley in 1949.

Within the years 1950 and 1956, more publications were made such as Alan Turing’s “Computer Machinery and Intelligence” in 1950. In 1955, the word “artificial intelligence” was first used in a workshop conveyed by the scientist, John McCarthy; however, the first computer to play checkers was developed prior to this time in 1952 by computer scientist Arthur Samuel. All of these developments evolved into research on how to further expand the field of artificial intelligence. The expansion of artificial intelligence which has since begun is still in its process as more independent machines are being created. Recent inventions in this regard include natural language generation; speech recognition; peer to peer network; machine learning, etc.

Such artificial intelligence technologies as natural language generation enables a computer-people form of communication; speech recognition such as voice typing enables the computer to decode human languages; machine learning enables computers to understand and process data sets.

Although the indelible mark of artificial intelligence is being imprinted across different areas where manpower was originally required, whether or not this technology can replace the “giant human brain” is unarguably a question of concern to many. While the possibilities seem high, many argue that computers cannot imitate every of man’s action. This is undoubtedly a complex argument.