AI - nothing new under the sun?

 For the past week I have worked alot with the history of AI for an upcoming course on AI and archives which I will be part of the teaching team during the next semester. This area have been rather tricky for me as a scholar in humanities to learn about, since most of the text is rather technical and does not really have historians as a point of departure. The texts that have been written as a way to popularize are also filled with technical terms such as "neural networks" which they seem to think is rather obvious terms for scholars from all fields. Yet I have read some technical courses at the university, and this have helped alot. I have even managed to read some of Alan Turings original writing, and apart from the math I found rather interesting. 

What I however have come learn during this week is actually how complex the notion of AI really is. Basically the idea of living machines have been part of western culture since ancient greece with Heifastos golden robots and for instance Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, that both describes self-aware technology that originates from gods or men. However, it was first during the 1940's advancement in neurology that the idea of making artificial brains became possible since neurologist figured out that the brain basically works binary and consists of a number of cells that either can emulate electronic impulses, or choose not to. This was an idea that quickly was coming over to computer science in the early 1950's, when computers went from being rather analogue to having the possibility to both execute and remember commands. 

Between the darmouth-conference in 1956 and 1974 the western world saw a surge in science dealing with AI. More and more complex algorithms took shape and computer scientists were actually quite convinced that a general artificial intelligence were only 5-8 years away. Then the main issue arose: the computers of the time were not capable of executing the amount of calculations needed to actually create an AI. Furthermore, they had to little storage space to actually train on in to achieve anything worth doing. It would take up until the 1990's when the technology were actually ready for making meaningful contributions, which manifested in deep blue beating reigning world champion of chess Kasparov in 1997. Then the development once again halted, until the late 2010's when the notion of big data in combination with large amount of storage space made it possible to actually further develop AI and giving us things such as ChatGPT. 

This is the basic story I will present at the course but what I find rather interesting is the relation between AI and the notion of an ongoing science revolution. As an undergraduate I read Thomas Kuhns The structure of scientific revolutions in which he states that science is often in a "norm"-state where no significant contributions are made. Then there are paradigm-shifts (i.e. scientific revolutions) which occurs when the boundaries of science is pushed, and furthermore these boundary-shifts are acknowledge by members of the scientific community. What is striking with the talk on AI is that whilst we most certainly are seeing the implementation of old ideas, the ideas themselves are not new. Thereby, we could actually question if we are seeing a scientific revolution or if this revolution simply consists of implementations of old ideas. 

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