Making Sense of AI. Anthony Elliott

Making Sense of AI - Anthony  Elliott


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multinational corporations operating across the borderless flows of the global economy.11 It is obvious that such an image of globalization is well geared to rendering AI as simply an upshot of the corporate activities of IBM, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Alibaba. Other writers have argued that globalization is synonymous with Americanization. AI here is viewed as a set of effects brought about by powerful actors, academic research institutes and industry labs, administrative entities and political forces promoting the Americanization of the world. Much AI research, as we will examine throughout this book, has indeed been funded by the American government, especially the US Department of Defense. Consider, for example, the extensive role of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which during the 1960s poured millions of dollars into the establishment of AI labs at MIT, Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University along with commercial AI laboratories including SRI International. As I discuss in some detail in chapter 3, the influence of the US Department of Defense upon the digital revolution was hugely consequential and brought in its train a global extension of emergent markets for artificial intelligence.

      Some argue, rightly in my view, that the rise of AI sprang directly from challenges that the West faced in relation to Soviet communism and the outcomes of the Cold War. Certainly, the general imperative of establishing military dominance in world politics meant that, during the Cold War, the US military sought to automate the translation of documents from Russian and other languages into English. This situation led to considerable state investment in machine translation research. During this initial period of increased defence funding in AI research, a cluster of economic, political and military changes occurred around the late 1950s and early 1960s that were of essential significance to the building of better intelligent machines and advanced AI systems. First, Soviet communism delivered a major shock to the American psyche with the launch of Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite, in 1957. Beyond this dramatic shock, further reverberations were felt throughout the West in the same year when Russia launched Sputnik 2, a spacecraft that put Laika the dog into orbit. The idea of a space future successfully colonized by Soviet-bloc countries spurred the USA into dramatically increasing spending – military and otherwise – on science, technology and research. Second, new research funding in AI – from machine translation to speech-recognition projects – was launched in America by agencies including the CIA, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense. This increasingly defence-driven system of research innovation resulted in a much greater speed-up of advances in automation as well as other breakthroughs in machine intelligence.

      was unique in bringing to the field a deep appreciation for human beings: our capacity to perceive, to adapt, to make choices, and to devise completely new ways of tackling apparently intractable problems. As an experimental psychologist, he found these abilities every bit as subtle and as worthy of respect as a computer’s ability to execute an algorithm. And that was why to him, the real challenge would always lie in adapting computers to the humans who used them, thereby exploiting the strengths of each.12

      In this speaking up for interactivity, technological interfaces, decentralization and connectivity, Licklider can in many ways be said to have shaped AI as we know it today.


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