Four times a year, I attend the Yizkor service at synagogue. Yizkor in Hebrew denotes "remembrance," and the official name of the service, Hazkarat Neshamot, means a "remembering of souls." During the service, I call to mind loved ones who have died--parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, close friends--reliving shared times that were cherished, and some that were fraught. I think about what I learned from these people, several of whom were in my life from my first moments of awareness. I recall being taught to swim by my father, hearing my pious Russian grandmother's tearful account of the Kishinev pogrom, standing by my father's bedside as a medical student in an underequipped community hospital as he suffered a fatal heart attack.

We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 – 28. The process of writing a television show typically involves a writers room and a lot of time, as humans figure out the plot and the dialogue that makes a show work. For the cult classic Stargate science fiction franchise, which spanned three series (SG-1, Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe), character and plot development was helmed by Stargate co-creator Brad Wright. In 2021, Wright publicly posted a message on Twitter asking if it was possible for AI to write an episode of Stargate that would appear on SciFi insider site The Companion. None other than Laurence Moroney, AI lead at Google, responded by picking up the gauntlet to try and prove what AI could do.–

We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - 28. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. The process of writing a television show typically involves a writers room and a lot of time, as humans figure out the plot and the dialogue that makes a show work. For the cult classic Stargate science fiction franchise, which spanned three series (SG-1, Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe), character and plot development was helmed by Stargate co-creator Brad Wright. In 2021, Wright publicly posted a message on Twitter asking if it was possible for AI to write an episode of Stargate that would appear on SciFi insider site The Companion. None other than Laurence Moroney, AI lead at Google, responded by picking up the gauntlet to try and prove what AI could do.–

Amazon Mechanical Turk, described as "artificial artificial intelligence", uses low-paid workers to complete mini-tasks that AI can't do on its own. In the late 18th Century, an automaton chess master known as the'Mechanical Turk' toured Europe and the US. Designed in 1770 by the inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen, the machine appeared to be able to defeat any human player. It later turned out the Turk was in fact a mechanical illusion. A puppet dressed in oriental garb, it concealed under its fez and robes a human chess master.

It is the ability of computers to learn, generalise, use knowledge in practice and make decisions. Behind that popular term, there is just statistics and mathematical modelling. How can this be explained to a child? I would say: "AI is how my laptop can learn things like you do, my dear child. It learns much more slowly and needs much more examples than you do."

Chess is a complicated game. It's a game of strategy between two opponents, but with no hidden information and all of the potential moves known by both players at the outset. With each turn, players communicate their intent and try to anticipate the possible countermoves. The ability to envision several moves in advance is a recipe for victory, and one that mathematicians and logicians have long found intriguing. Despite some early mechanical chess-playing machines--and at least one chess-playing hoax--mechanized chess play remained hypothetical until the advent of digital computing.

The history of AI is often told as the story of machines getting smarter over time. What's lost is the human element in the narrative, how intelligent machines are designed, trained, and powered by human minds and bodies. In this six-part series, we explore that human history of AI--how innovators, thinkers, workers, and sometimes hucksters have created algorithms that can replicate human thought and behavior (or at least appear to). While it can be exciting to be swept up by the idea of super-intelligent computers that have no need for human input, the true history of smart machines shows that our AI is only as good as we are. In the year 1770, at the court of the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa, an inventor named Wolfgang von Kempelen presented a chess-playing machine.

Traditional art has an element of illusionism to it. This has long been commented on, and is responsible for the prevalent thought (at least among the general public) that the more realistic the artwork, the more a man-made creation looks like a nature-made one, the better it must be. The ancient praised the lifelike naturalism of painters, with Pliny relating the famous story of a duel between two artists, one of whom was able to fool a bird into swooping in to peck at his painted grapes, whereas the other was able to fool the first artist, tricking him into trying to pull aside a curtain that was, in fact, his painting of a curtain. Fooling a human trumps fooling an animal, and the ability to inspire awe, wonder, the "how-did-they-do-that" expression, has long been the goal of most traditional art. Think of a tale of Pygmalion, in which an ivory sculpture of a naked woman was so realistic, and its sculptor's love for it so strong, that it actually came to life.

The peak of all this may be the moment at which the inventor Ray Kurzweil asks, "As Machines become more like People, will People become more like God?" The infectiously enthusiastic Kurzweil is the leading proponent of "Strong A.I.," a brave new world in which a "Non-invasive Surgery-Free Reversible Programmable Distributed Brain Implant" will soon become available. In the keynote essay in "Are We Spiritual Machines?" Kurzweil imagines nanobots--hyper-intelligent miniaturized robots--zipping around our brains and downloading our mental software onto new hard drives which will somehow become re-embodied as us. Immortality looms, if "we are sufficiently careful to make frequent back-ups."

In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a simultaneous exhibition. I walked from one machine to the next, making my moves over a period of more than five hours. The four leading chess computer manufacturers had sent their top models, including eight named after me from the electronics firm Saitek. It illustrates the state of computer chess at the time that it didn't come as much of a surprise when I achieved a perfect 32–0 score, winning every game, although there was an uncomfortable moment. At one point I realized that I was drifting into trouble in a game against one of the "Kasparov" brand models. If this machine scored a win or even a draw, people would be quick to say that I had thrown the game to get PR for the company, so I had to intensify my efforts. Eventually I found a way to trick the machine with a sacrifice it should have refused. From the human perspective, or at least from my perspective, those were the good old days of man vs. machine chess. Eleven years later I narrowly defeated the supercomputer Deep Blue in a match.