15robots everywhere
Minsky has been one of the main advocates of AI from its begin-
ning (Noble, 1997). He was already at Dartmouth College in 1956
when the rst meeting in the AI eld took place. Minsky suggested
it is possible to build intelligent machines, because brains themselves
are machines. According to Minsky, steps in that direction have been
taken by machines that are able to look up information, recognize
patterns, have expert knowledge, and prove mathematical theorems.
He also thought about the advent of robotics. Minsky foresaw a fusion
between man and machine in the distant future. According to him,
thinking machines represent the next step in evolution. e machina
sapiens is a new species that will eventually surpass Homo sapiens. AI
was, therefore, seen as the ultimate turning point in human evolution.
e main contemporary spokesperson on this theme is Raymond
Kurzweil. He is a pioneer in the eld of speech recognition, and the
inventor, in 1976, of a device that turned text into voice for the blind
reader. In his book and movie e Singularity Is Near (2005), he sug-
gests that science and technology are developing exponentially. is
will inevitably lead, he believes, to a point at which AI will surpass
human intelligence. Vernor Vinge (1993) calls that moment “singu-
larity.” Kurzweil thinks that we will achieve this technical and cul-
tural turning point before the middle of this century.
1.2.4.2 Predictions from the Past Let us return to predictions from
the 1950s and 1960s. Norbert Wiener believed that computers would
come to play an important role in the production process, and spoke
of a forthcoming second Industrial Revolution (Umpleby, 2008). But
in addition to the use of AI for industrial tasks, all sorts of creative
and social tasks were foreseen for AI. Alan Turing thought that com-
puters would be able to communicate with people, and invented the
so-called Turing test. In it, a person sends questions to both another
person and a computer located in another room. On the basis of their
replies, the interrogator must determine whether he or she is com-
municating with a human or a machine. Turing predicted that in
50years (thus around now), computers would master this question-
and-answer game so well that the questioner would have a less than
70% chance of distinguishing, within 5minutes, the computer from
the person. Marvin Minsky stated in 1958: “Our mind-engineering
skills could grow to the point of enabling us to construct articial