Artificial Intelligence: The Age-old Quest for Thinking Machines

The phrase artificial intelligence has become common in our current day discourse. Fuelled by successes in machine learning, and applications interacting with us in speech and natural language, many commentators have made a leap of faith that behind these successes is a thinking machine, and this has even stoked fears of machines overcoming humankind. In this two-part article, we look at how close we are to the original quest for creating “machines who think”. In the first part, we trace the evolution of mechanical computers and also the notion of the mind up to the era before digital computers appeared on the horizon.