2 Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a term that in its broadest sense would indicate the ability of an artifact to perform the same kind of functions that characterize human thought (Encarta). Is artificial intelligence used in companies and everyday people? Also how does A.I. help you? Where is A.I. headed? Are a few questions I will answer for you. Artificial Intelligence is a fairly new subject. “The term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was first coined in 1956 by an influential figure in the field, John McCarthy.”(BBCI). McCarthy brought together researchers interested in neural networks and the study of intelligence and was known for “laying the groundwork for the future of A.I. research.”(BBCI).

As the years pasted A.I. has become more and more a reality. In the 1997, “in a landmark match, the chess system Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov, the world’s human chess champion for the previous twelve years.”(Leake, 2002). Although this was a great achievement it is much more difficult to make a computer do things that we take for granite like “seeing is not just a matter of recognizing patters in visual images, but involves making sense of the environment, including understanding all the many ways it can help or hinder us. Similarly, the ability to understand and use a natural language, like English, or Urdu, turned out to be far more 3 complex than some of the early researchers thought” (Sloman, 1998, p. 3). This is why researchers need to go more in-depth with “the study of information, how it can be acquired, stored, manipulated, extended, used, and transmitted, whether in machines, or humans or other animals”(Sloman, 1998, p2) The more we know about how are brain functions and thinks the faster we will get to true A.I. Artificial Intelligence is used every day. For example “In medicine, programs have been developed that analyze the disease symptoms, medical history, and laboratory test results of a patient and then suggest a diagnosis to the physician”(Encarta). In some cases this does not work because the computer cannot factor everything in and then the results are wrong. Also next time you credit card gets stolen be thankful of A.I., a computer at the credit card company tracks your account purchases and will automatically disable your card. All of these new technology are great but they have down sides to them to for example what if you decide to go on a big shopping spree and when you try to purchase the items the A.I turns off your card. The future direction of A.I. is split in the middle “in 1950, a landmark paper by Alan Turing argued for the possibility of building intelligent computing system (Turing, 1950). “That paper proposed an operational test for comparing the intellectual ability of humans and A.I. systems, now generally called the “Turing Test.” In the Turing Test, a judge sits in a room with a Teletype and in the other room there is a person and a computer. The judge will type each of them a question and they will answer him back. The judge only can distinct the too apart by anonymous labels, both human and machine try to convince the questioner that they are the human: the goal for the machine is to answer so that the judge cannot reliably distinguish which is which”(Leake, 2002, p. 2). One negative point about this theory is pointed out by Kenneth M. Ford a nontraditional A.I. scientist he say’s “Not only does this test rely on a judge’s subjective impressions of what it means to be intelligent, but it fails to account for weaker, different, or even stronger forms of intelligence than those deemed human (Bower, 2003). Ford makes some good point about how can we measure intelligent. Different cultures have wide perception of what is intelligent. One culture may think its smart to dink the blood of a cow, while the other culture may think of that as gross and stupid. Ford thinks the future of A.I. is in cognitive prostheses. Cognitive prostheses “computational tool that amplifies or extends a person’s thought and perception (Bower, 2003). Ford says it like cognitive prostheses is like binoculars they enhance in human intellect rather than dust correcting the problem to normal. (Bower, 2003). You can also look at it as if Ford had his way a man in a wheelchair would be the bionic man and if Turing had it his way the man would dust be able act like a normal person. “That’s a controversial stand in the A.I. intelligence community. Although stung by criticism of their failure to create the insightful computers envisioned by the field’s founders nearly 50 years ago investigators have seen their computational advances adapted to a variety of uses. These range from Internet search engines and video games, and decision-making systems in medicine and military. And regardless of skeptics, such as Ford, many researchers now have their sights set on building robots that pass the Turing Test with flying colors”(Bower, 2003).

To conclude Artificial Intelligence is a fairly new “discipline”. We have much more to learn and discover about A.I. Even thought there are there are still some question on what path we shall take “Turning” or “cognitive prostheses”. A.I. in the future no matter what happens is garunted to be a big part in psychology.