George Zarkadakis

My name is Stephanie Dick, and I'm an assistant professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University.

She holds a PhD in the history of science with a specialization in the history of mathematics and computing.

These machines produced massive amounts of heat and noise.

And working with them, you had to carry these boxes of punch cards back and forth as input and output and stick it into the machine.

This is like a sweatshop.

Everything was really slow, very different from the machinery that we're all used to today, which is almost as fast as light and conforms to our every demand.

You know, the most disturbing part of the history of AI for me comes from the fact that these men who were working in artificial intelligence looked at those massive, noisy, hot, mainframe computers and saw themselves in it.

They looked at them and identified a deep affinity that there was something fundamentally shared between their minds and these machines.

Coming up, as we unlock the secrets of man and machine, we ask the question, will this knowledge bring us closer to perfection or destruction?

A machine is a device that can perform specific tasks more efficiently, or with greater precision, than humans can do alone.

The basic idea behind the machine is to make work easier.

Humans have been creating machines for thousands of years, starting with simple tools like the wheel,

and advancing to complex machines, like computers and robots.

The relationship between humans and machines continues to evolve, and is likely to become increasingly important, as advances in artificial intelligence continue to shape our world.

It was instigated by John McCarthy, who was a mathematics professor at Dartmouth.

The proposal that John McCarthy wrote pulls no punches at all.

The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.

So right from the beginning, there's this pronouncement that human learning and intelligence can be mechanized and automated.

It fascinates me.

It's an enormously grandiose idea.