A Citizen's Guide to Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The history of computer science is intimately linked with the history of AI. When Alan Turing invented the general- purpose computer in 1936 (on paper!), he was evidently thinking about how to model a person doing something clever— namely, a specific kind of mathematical calculation. Turing was also one of the first to specu- late that the machine he invented for that purpose could be used to repro- duce humanlike intelligence more generally. In this sense, the father of computer science is also the father of AI. But other computer pioneers also thought about computing machinery in human (indeed anthropomorphic) terms. For instance, John von Neumann, in a famous 1945 paper introduc- ing the architecture still used by computers today, used a term from psy- chology, “memory,” to refer to a computer’s storage units. In