The future for artificial intelligence

EE February 1986 THE FUTURE FOR ARTICIFAL INTELLIGENCE by Professor Margaret A. Boden, MA(Cantabl, PhD(Havard), FBA Despite its short history, ar- tificial intelligence already promises to change everyday life as much as the Industrial Rev- olution did. Machine intelligence was foreseen in the 19th cen- tury by Charles Babbage, whose cogs-and-gears calculating machine worked in a way basically similar to today"s com- puters. A century later, Alan Turing provided a theory about what ques- tions could in principle be answered by such a machine. Artificial intelli- gence grew out of the work on digital computers in World War II, and was given the dignity of a name in 1956. Since the early efforts in the mid-1950s, it has had some notable successes. Today"s computers can perform some of the tasks normally done only by our minds - though only to a very limited degree. For in- stance, some programs can respond sensibly to queries or statements ex- pressed in natural languages such as ...