Artificial intelligence: The machines with alien minds

Would modern artificial intelligence live up to the dreams of the field's founders? But in many ways, the smartest machines we have built are entities they never could have imagined. In 1956, attendees of a research camp at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire coined the phrase "artificial intelligence" to describe its efforts to "find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves." Compare that with the AI project that Facebook announced this month. Under one of the world's most prominent experts, it will "do world-class artificial-intelligence research using all of the knowledge that people have shared on Facebook" – with potential gains including building "services that are much more natural to interact with."