Isaac Asimov Describes How AI Will Liberate Humans and Their Creativity (1992)

Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence may be one of the major top­ics of our his­tor­i­cal moment, but it can be sur­pris­ing­ly tricky to define. In the more than 30-year-old inter­view clip above, Isaac Asi­mov describes arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence as “a phrase that we use for any device that does things which, in the past, we have asso­ci­at­ed only with human intel­li­gence.” At one time, not so very long before, “only human beings could alpha­bet­ize cards”; in the machines that could even then do it in a frac­tion of a sec­ond, “you’ve got an exam­ple of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence.” Not that humans were ever espe­cial­ly good at card alpha­bet­i­za­tion, nor at arith­metic: “the cheap­est com­put­er in the world can mul­ti­ply and divide more accu­rate­ly than we can.” You could see arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence as a kind of fron­tier, then, which moves for­ward as com­put­er­ized machines take over the tasks humans pre­vi­ous­ly had to do them­selves. “Every indus­try, the gov­ern­ment it ... Read full article.