In 1965, Herbert Simon, one of the founders of the new science of Artificial Intelligence (AI), wrote that “machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work that a man can do”. He was wrong of course – but maybe his mistake was only a matter of timing.
If Simon were to see what computing machines were capable of, fifty-five years after he made this remark, surely even he would be amazed. A single smartphone contains more computing power than all the world’s computers in 1965 put together. And many of the philosophical arguments against the possibility of AI from the 1960s and 70s fell flat on their face as the technology advanced. The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus also claimed in 1965 that “no chess program can play even amateur chess” – true at the time, but proved false soon after. When in 1997 the IBM programme Deep Blue beat the chess champion Garry Kasparov, this conclusively destroyed the idea that world-class chess was something computers can’t do; Kasparov has commented recently that “today you can buy a chess engine for your laptop that will beat Deep Blue quite easily”. And the familiar claim that computers could never really use their stored knowledge as well as human beings was shaken in 2011 by IBM’s Watson programme, which won the top $1 million prize on the American game show Jeopardy, beating the best human competitors.
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