Diana Lucía Sánchez Ruiz

From fiction to reality, the evolution of artificial intelligence

     

     Through the time, technology has been developing significantly until it is now part of our daily lives. Nowadays, in most of our activities there are involved devices such as computers, cellphones, TVs, cars and other machines, which have become fundamental in the society. It is possible to say that new generations are growing up in a technological environment, in the way this culture is interiorizing in their lives; at the point this machines are adapting to improve their functions, and this is by helping more to the user.

     However, the greatest impact that receives the society from technology is made by the artificial intelligence, which is the ability of some devices to perform a narrow task; so it reduce incredibly the human´s effort to execute some specific activities. In fact, the same name “artificial intelligence” denotes that is the faculty of intelligence a device is able to acquire, by making thinking process as humans.

     Even though they haven´t been yet totally self-controlled, machines are starting to process and think by theirselves, in an autonomous way, developing their own intelligence. In terms of engineering, “autonomy means that the problem solvers have their own persistent thread of control and that they decide for themselves which actions they should perform at what time” (Jennings, 1999). In this way, the humanity are relegating intelligence needed activities to machines, something that are changing lifestyles completely all around the world.

     

     Since the XX century, historical events like World Wars or the arrival of the human being to the moon, have led to the developing technologies and amplifying the machine´s utilities. As a result, investigations are turned to make the machines to do more than their basic purpose. For example, airplanes have the objective to travel long distances in a short period of time through the air; during the wars, they were equipped with army for warlike purpose and later, they were accustomed in order to carry a lot of people with baggage, and fitting its space for passengers to have a comfortable trip, using screens and putting a kitchen on it.

     Nevertheless, it was until the end of that century, when the scientific community following the mentioned purpose, started to give this faculties to machines and allowing them to develop an autonomy. Cellphones passed from being a telephone device to a smart device able to do things that other machines used to do, like the camera or calculator and in XXI century leaded by Apple with Siri, there were included the artificial intelligence. It seems not only that they acquired a self-intelligence, also a personality and the cellphone is actually as a complement of the people.

     Something that in the past had been seen as science fiction, is turning in reality. In the path that science is travelling it is supposed that machines are going to still improving more and acquiring more artificial intelligence. As the humanity, we have the labor of control this machines and understanding that they are created for helping us in many tasks, and not to replacing at all the human being. If this is totally comprehend, the technology will develop in fantastic way, like we see in the movies.

Bibliography

Jennings, N. R. (1999). On agent-based software engineering. Southampton: Department of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton.