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C00002 00002		If you drive into the parking lot of the Stanford Artificial
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	If you drive into the parking lot of the Stanford Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory, you will see a sign that says \F2CAUTION, ROBOT
VEHICLE\F0.  People react to this sign in various ways: some with hope,
some with fear, and some with curiousity and amusement.  What is there
to hope for or fear or be curious about?

	We can hope for a car that will drive itself to whatever
destination is keyed into its control unit.  Such a car could be used
by children, old people, and the handicapped.  It could
go by itself for servicing or to the store to pick up something that
had been ordered by telephone.  Naturally, it must drive more safely
than the best human drivers.  We can also hope that it will be able
to drive safely faster and closer to other cars than can human drivers,
because it will react faster, will not suffer lapses of inattention,
and will co-ordinate its movements with those of the other cars in
its vicinity.  Of course, robotics has many other possibilities besides
automated cars, but we will use it as an example for now.

	Artificial intelligence arouses a number of fears, but most of
them center on the idea that intelligent machines might prove
uncontrollable or than man might suffer irrepairable damage to his
pride and self respect.  The automated cars might crash when some
central computer broke down or they might take you somewhere you
didn't want to go.  Evil people might use intelligent machines to
conquer the world or the machines themselves might develop a desire
to conquer the world.  Even if nothing directly bad happened, people
might have no motivation to do anything once they knew that there were
machines smarter than they.

	We will return to the hopes and fears later in the article,
when there is more information on which to base a discussion.
The curious have lots of questions:

	1. How intelligent are the smartest present machines, and
what can they do?  How do they work?

	2. Is it possible for machines to be as intelligent or more
intelligent than people, and when might this come about, if at
all?
	3. What has been discovered about how to make machines
behave intelligently?

	4. What kind of personalities might intelligent machines
have?

	The idea of intelligent machines originated in three stages:
The first stage is to make an artificial intelligent machine by
magic.  There is a Jewish legend of the Rabbi of Prague creating
a monster called the \F1Golem\F0 in the 16th century.  In the
early 19th century, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote about the creation
of Frankenstein's monster by science, but the science was just
a fictional device playing the same role as magic since how
the alleged science was supposed to work wasn't stated.  The idea
of a robot as a metal man built up from parts became common in
the 1920s.  However, serious efforts to understand what would
be required to make intelligent machines began only after the
design of the first universal computers in the late
1940s, almost all work since then has been based on them.

	Artificial intelligence is based on universal computers
for two reasons.  First, a universal computer can carry out any
computational procedure written in the language of the machine
and put into the machine's memory.  Moreover, all universal
computers are equivalent in that any procedure written for
one machine can be translated to run on any other universal
machine.  (Of course, one machine may be faster than another
or may have a larger memory or may have input and output equipment
that the other machine doesn't have).  As a consequence of this,
it doesn't matter whether the machine is made of integrated circuits
or transistors or vacuum tubes or even protplasm; the possible
procedures are the same.  Therefore, when we think about
artificial intelligence, we think about the procedures we want
the machine to carry out and not about the construction of the
machine itself.  So far as I know, this simple point was not
made before universal computers existed.

	The first important scientific paper about artificial
intelligence was Allan Turing's \F1Computing Machinery and
Intelligence\F0 published in 1950.