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This is how it all started…


The beginnings of Artificial Intelligence (AI) represent a fascinating chapter in the history of human thought and technology. They date back to the mid-20th century, when scientists and visionaries began exploring the possibility of creating machines capable of thinking and learning like humans. This quest to replicate human intelligence in machines gave rise to revolutionary advances that have transformed countless aspects of our society and our way of life.

One of the starting points of AI is found in the 1950s, with the birth of modern computing. Pioneers such as Alan Turing, considered the father of computing and AI, laid the theoretical foundations for what would come later. His seminal work on the “Turing Machine” and his famous Turing Test laid the foundation for thinking about artificial intelligence and how we could evaluate it.

However, the term “Artificial Intelligence” itself was coined later, at a 1956 conference at Dartmouth College, where John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon, among others, met to discuss the possibility. to create intelligent machines. This historic meeting marked the formal beginning of the AI ​​discipline as a field of study.

Over the following decades, advances in hardware and software laid the foundation for the development of AI. Different approaches and paradigms emerged, from symbolic logic to machine learning and neural networks. One of the early milestones was the development of the chess program “The Turk” in the 18th century, although it was later discovered that it was being operated by a human. However, it set a precedent for the idea of ​​machines that could challenge the human mind in strategy games.

In the 1960s and 1970s, AI saw significant growth, with research and development in areas such as problem solving, natural language processing, and computer vision. One of the highlights was the development of the “ELIZA” program by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966, which simulated a therapeutic conversation and demonstrated the ability of machines to interact with humans in more complex ways.

During the 1980s and 1990s, AI continued to advance, although it also faced periods of disillusionment known as “AI winters,” where progress seemed to stagnate. However, these periods of stagnation were followed by new advances that revitalized the field. One of the most important milestones of this era was the development of expert systems, which used rules and knowledge bases to imitate human reasoning in specific domains.

The turn of the millennium brought with it a renaissance of AI, driven largely by the increase in computing power and the availability of large amounts of data. Machine learning, and in particular the deep neural network approach, began to bear fruit in practical applications such as speech recognition, machine translation, and autonomous driving.

Today, AI is present in almost every aspect of our daily lives, from online search engines to content recommendation systems and virtual assistants on our mobile devices. It continues to evolve at a rapid pace, with advances in areas such as generative AI, autonomous robotics and explanatory AI, which seeks to make AI systems more transparent and understandable to humans.

Dr. Marco Benavides

Medicine and Surgery