Artificial Intelligence in Byte-sized Chunks

The Second World War brought devastation and horrific suffering for millions of people. But like all wars, it acted as a catalyst for rapid technological advancement

their own ways at surviving in their respective niches.

Biological brains

Grey Walter likened their brains to two sensory neurons: one for light, one for touch.

investigated morphogenesis, or how we develop into complex organisms from a single cell

Walter who tried to build cybernetic systems were making the first electronic artificial intelligences.

Cybernetics was the first formal study of intelligence,

ever-evolving realm

But a world where we have working AI pervasive throughout our technology also means something else. It means that we do not always know if an image or piece of music or even a passage of text is written by a human or not. This blurring of creative authorship challenges our traditional notions of creativity and authenticity in the digital age. And in case you just noticed a change of style, that previous sentence was generated by an AI, when asked to add to the first two sentences in this paragraph.

robot called Cora (Conditional Reflex Analogue), which was designed to learn how to associate a whistle with a light, inspired by Ivan Pavlov’s experiments with dogs that were trained to salivate at the sound of a bell. Although Cora started life as a robot much like Elmer and Elsie, eventually Grey Walter performed ‘surgery’ and removed the specific learning circuits so he could study this part of the electronic brain on its own.

Grey Walter used pieces of old alarm clocks and army surplus materials to build two mechanical tortoises called Elmer and Elsie: autonomous battery-operated robots that used a rotating light sensor on the top to detect bright lights and move towards them.