Humans have been making tools since the early stone age (about two million years ago), that's why we're so good at it. Before the 18th century, most of our tools were simple devices designed to give us some kind of mechanical advantage in accomplishing a given task. Then Britain gave the world the industrial revolution and the age of the machine was born. In the late 19th century Edison invented the light bulb and the age of electric tools was upon us. In the middle of the 20th century the transistor replaced the vacuum tube and the digital age was born.
It became possible to create machines that could perform calculations. At first these calculations were relatively simple and the machines were comparatively slow, but the relentless march of technology enabled machines to perform more and more elaborate calculations in less and less time. It wasn't long before some people noticed that the human brain is also a calculating machine, and that this latest kind of tool could be thought of as an analogue of the human brain. These people speculated that calculating machines would continue getting faster and more elaborate and that a time would come when it might be possible for a machine to equal the human brain in speed and complexity.
In 1956 the term Artificial Intelligence was coined by John McCarthy. Six years earlier Alan Turing had proposed the Turing Test as a means of determining whether a machine has the capacity to demonstrate thought. In 1965 Joseph Weizenbaum wrote a program called ELIZA, which enabled a computer to converse with a human on any topic. Since then a great deal of research has gone into trying to make machines smarter, and Ray Kurtzweil in his books: The Age of Intelligent Machines and The Age of Spiritual Machines speculates that by 2030, machine intelligence will not only surpass human intelligence, but in doing so, machines will become "conscious".Opponents of the drive for machine intelligence are worried that if machines become smart enough, they will gain personalities and become evil, ambitious monsters that will usurp their creators and take over! What these people have failed to understand is that machines have already developed malicious personalities and have, for a number of years, been doing their utmost to turn our lives into a living hell.
The photocopier at my work, for example, knows exactly how to push my rage button. It sits there looking qualified and efficient while I carefully drill down through its menus telling it exactly what I want it to do (double sided, colour, staple and collate), then I entrust my valuable originals to it's helpful-looking feed-tray, press the GO button and the bastard immediately turns my originals into pulp, and jams up the copy paper so far inside its guts that nothing short of a crowbar will get it out again, then the bloody thing's broken for the rest of the day and I have to endure dirty looks from my fellow-workers until the bloke from Ricoh comes out and explains like I'm a 4 year old about how it's all my fault because I should have fanned the bloody paper before I put it in the machine. Excuse me but this is a $15 thousand machine, and all I'm asking it to do is photocopy a bit of paper! Try and tell me that machine doesn't have a personality.
And what about Windows? Do I really need to share a practical anecdote to convince anyone that this collection of ones and zeros is, in fact, a dangerously psychotic, insanity-inducing maniac? Every day this villain conspires to turn my documents into gibberish by incorrectly re-numbering my list points, applying absurd formatting to my letters, Americanising my spelling and then going catatonic and losing my last 4 hours of work into the digital void. "Did you save it?" asks the helpdesk guy. As if he needs to ask.
If you're waiting in terror for the day our obedient machine slaves turn on us, you can quit waiting, it's already happened, and we still think it's us that are in charge.
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