Artificial Intelligence
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History of AI
AI has been on the human mind for such a long time that Greek mythology even has a place for it. Although a dream people have been creating mystical contraptions and gadgets to imitate human beings for hundreds of years. But it wasn't until after the World wars that the first "high tech" computers began solving problems. Problem solving machines are just the basic these days. Now people have bigger priorities for thinking machines. People desire machines to have thoughts and emotions. How does one create a machine that can become aware of its self? How can you create a machine to feel emotion? These two questions are simply two of thousands of other questions scientists have concerning AI. While MIT experiments with robots that show emotion, others write programs that can actually hold an interesting conversation with you. (Go ahead and try)[1]
Present and Future
AI is a field of Science that scares and intrigues many people. The fact of the matter is that AI creates many spin off technologies as well as help to understand human brain function. A scientist named Herbert Simon once said, "Just as we use motors to augment human or horse power. Robotics and expert systems are major branches of that. The other is to use a computer's artificial intelligence to understand how humans think. In a humanoid way. If you test your programs not merely by what they can accomplish, but how they accomplish it, then you're really doing cognitive science; you're using AI to understand the human mind." Solving the riddle of Artificial Intelligence is more of a brain science than anything else. Yes, computer science and robotics will eventually play a significant role, but the cognitive side of AI is far from understood. Although, the mysteries of the brain are elusive, AI research brings us closer to understanding the human mind.
The Web
That's just what it is; a giant spider web encasing the earth in millions of miles of fiber-optic cable. "Like the brain, the Internet has circadian rhythms that follow the sun as the planet rotates under it" (Terrence Sejnowski, Computational Neuroscientist). Imagining the fluctuation of Internet users as the earth spins from night to day around the world is a pretty intense thought. Some scientists speculate that the internet will become the first AI. The cortex of the brain contains roughly 100 million million synapses in all!! In computer terms this equals about 10^15 bytes of information (assuming that each synapses equals one byte of information). "Thus, the internet and our ability to search it are within reach of the limits of the raw storage and communications capacity of the human brain, and should exceed it by 2015." (Terrence Sejnowski, Computational Neuroscientist) That is one intense thought!
Some scientists ponder whether or not the internet could become aware of its self via a seed in the form of a program planted inside the internet. Some even argue that the internet's evolution closely resembles that of human evolution. Although there isn't any way of knowing, the internet could currently be aware of itself. If this is true then it's probably laughing at me right now.
References
http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AITopics/HomePage