Artificial Intelligence :: Exploratory Essays Research Papers

Artificial IntelligenceMy name is Dorothy, give tongue to the girl, and I am going to the Emerald city, to ask the Oz to send me back to Kansas. Where is the Emerald City? he enquired and who is Oz? Why, dont you know? she returned in surprise. No, indeed I dont know anything. You see, I am stuffed, so I have no brains at all, he answered, sadly. Oh, said Dorothy Im awfully sorry for you. Do you think, he asked, If I go to the Emerald City with you, that the great Oz would give me some brains? I cannot tell you, she returned but you may add together with me, if you like. If Oz will not give you any brains you will be no worse off than you are now. -L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful World of Oz1 As Dorothy and the straw man begin their search for a brain, we can catch a glimpse of an issue that has been bouncing around our culture for centuries can man make a machine think? While Baums story does not focus on the Scarecrow as the possibility of a thinking machine, he does raise the in certitude of whether a human brain is necessary for thinking. This question of the brains vitality is first exposed to our culture with what many literary critics feel is the line of Science Fiction, Mary Shelleys Frankenstein. Frankenstein is the story of dead body parts being brought to life through the use of electricity. After witnessing the creatures action readers are left petition if the human brain is sufficient for thinking or if there is more to thinking than a brain? Other Science Fiction writers took this to a contrasting level and created the robot, a non-human thinking machine. Frankenstein is on the cusp of humans and non-humans and the beginning of the debate of what it means to artificially think. These imagined ideas caused others to think about making these ideas a reality. Marvin Minsky, star of the original scientists involved in establishing artificial intelligence, cites Science Fiction as one of his major motivators to enter the world of AI. It was not un til the summer of 1956 that scientists felt that it susceptibility be possible to write non-fiction accounts of robots at some point in the near future. During the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College, scholars, who would later be considered the founding fathers of