00100		If you drive into the parking lot of the Stanford Artificial
00200	Intelligence Laboratory, you will see a sign that says \F2CAUTION, ROBOT
00300	VEHICLE\F0.  People react to this sign in various ways: some with hope,
00400	some with fear, and some with curiousity and amusement.  What is there
00500	to hope for or fear or be curious about?
00600	
00700		We can hope for a car that will drive itself to whatever
00800	destination is keyed into its control unit.  Such a car could be used
00900	by children, old people, and the handicapped.  It could
01000	go by itself for servicing or to the store to pick up something that
01100	had been ordered by telephone.  Naturally, it must drive more safely
01200	than the best human drivers.  We can also hope that it will be able
01300	to drive safely faster and closer to other cars than can human drivers,
01400	because it will react faster, will not suffer lapses of inattention,
01500	and will co-ordinate its movements with those of the other cars in
01600	its vicinity.  Of course, robotics has many other possibilities besides
01700	automated cars, but we will use it as an example for now.
01800	
01900		Artificial intelligence arouses a number of fears, but most of
02000	them center on the idea that intelligent machines might prove
02100	uncontrollable or than man might suffer irrepairable damage to his
02200	pride and self respect.  The automated cars might crash when some
02300	central computer broke down or they might take you somewhere you
02400	didn't want to go.  Evil people might use intelligent machines to
02500	conquer the world or the machines themselves might develop a desire
02600	to conquer the world.  Even if nothing directly bad happened, people
02700	might have no motivation to do anything once they knew that there were
02800	machines smarter than they.
02900	
03000		We will return to the hopes and fears later in the article,
03100	when there is more information on which to base a discussion.
03200	The curious have lots of questions:
03300	
03400		1. How intelligent are the smartest present machines, and
03500	what can they do?  How do they work?
03600	
03700		2. Is it possible for machines to be as intelligent or more
03800	intelligent than people, and when might this come about, if at
03900	all?
04000		3. What has been discovered about how to make machines
04100	behave intelligently?
04200	
04300		4. What kind of personalities might intelligent machines
04400	have?
04500	
04600		The idea of intelligent machines originated in three stages:
04700	The first stage is to make an artificial intelligent machine by
04800	magic.  There is a Jewish legend of the Rabbi of Prague creating
04900	a monster called the \F1Golem\F0 in the 16th century.  In the
05000	early 19th century, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote about the creation
05100	of Frankenstein's monster by science, but the science was just
05200	a fictional device playing the same role as magic since how
05300	the alleged science was supposed to work wasn't stated.  The idea
05400	of a robot as a metal man built up from parts became common in
05500	the 1920s.  However, serious efforts to understand what would
05600	be required to make intelligent machines began only after the
05700	design of the first universal computers in the late
05800	1940s, almost all work since then has been based on them.
05900	
06000		Artificial intelligence is based on universal computers
06100	for two reasons.  First, a universal computer can carry out any
06200	computational procedure written in the language of the machine
06300	and put into the machine's memory.  Moreover, all universal
06400	computers are equivalent in that any procedure written for
06500	one machine can be translated to run on any other universal
06600	machine.  (Of course, one machine may be faster than another
06700	or may have a larger memory or may have input and output equipment
06800	that the other machine doesn't have).  As a consequence of this,
06900	it doesn't matter whether the machine is made of integrated circuits
07000	or transistors or vacuum tubes or even protplasm; the possible
07100	procedures are the same.  Therefore, when we think about
07200	artificial intelligence, we think about the procedures we want
07300	the machine to carry out and not about the construction of the
07400	machine itself.  So far as I know, this simple point was not
07500	made before universal computers existed.
07600	
07700		The first important scientific paper about artificial
07800	intelligence was Allan Turing's \F1Computing Machinery and
07900	Intelligence\F0 published in 1950.