The era of AI

At the end of the first section of this chapter, we mentioned that we are interested in teaching machines to act intelligently. This task entails the simulation of human intelligence in machines to make them think and act like real humans, but, of course, this is far more than a modest goal. Even from the creation of the first computers in the 1940s, the expectation was that machines would match humans in general intelligence. Back then, there was a great degree of optimism that this could happen in the foreseeable future. These great expectations paved the way for an emerging field called artificial intelligence (AI) that has faced several hype and investment cycles ever since, followed by periods of disappointment in the mid-70s and mid-90s. The great promise of AI has been recorded in myriad science fiction novels and movies. Since then, the high expectations inspired by this vision have not been fully met. Also, the term intelligent is still controversial due to whether...