Artificial Intelligence Background
Wendell H. Chun · 2024
The expectations of smart machines (robots and artificial intelligence [AI]) have been high. The promise of machines that “think” intrigues everyone, including the public in general. There is an expectation that machines someday will display human intelligence, and it is speculated that expert human knowledge should be innate. Inherent knowledge is those skills that are beneficial to robots in completing planned goals using robotic behaviors. With the ever-increasing speed and computing power of modern computers, we may be able to construct smart machines for specific problems (e.g., autonomous vehicle control and credit card fraud detection), and to be sure, the complexity of the problems for which smart machines are deployed is increasing as we progress, but will we ever construct machines that can learn for themselves from scratch, that is, machines that can truly reason? Similar promises are expected from robots, for example, remember that amazing robot you were promised when you were a kid? The one that would: fold the laundry, clean the toilets, or do your homework? On TV and in the movies, such robotic machines have been with us for quite a while, from Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still to R2-D2 in Star Wars and T-800 in The Terminator. Along with flying cars and teleportation, it seemed just a matter of time before we all would have our own reliable robot. So where are we today? This is a story about AI and robotics, but neither technology can be developed in isolation. In past history, these technologies were developed in parallel paths where a robot without intelligence would be in the same category as a brain without a body. Roboticists assumed that AI would be developed in parallel, while AI researchers assumed that robotics would be a sub-element of their technology. The reality is that AI without a body is hard to demonstrate to the public. In essence, we require the mind and body together ( Figure 1.1 ).