“Artificial intelligence (AI) is smart software and hardware capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. AI is the elucidation of the human learning process, the quantification of the human thinking process, the explication of human behavior, and the understanding of what makes intelligence possible. It is mankind's final step in the journey to understanding ourselves, and I hope to take part in this new, but promising science.”
I wrote these words as a starry-eyed student applying to Carnegie Mellon University’s Ph.D. program almost 40 years ago. Computer scientist John McCarthy coined the term “artificial intelligence” even earlier — at the legendary Dartmouth Conference in the summer of 1956. In the first three and a half decades of my AI journey, AI as a field of inquiry was essentially confined to academia, with very few successful commercial adaptations.
