AI: Past, Present, and Future

In this third and final blog post, let’s take a look at where AI might be heading in the future. Grace et al. from Berkeley, Bonn, and Oxford published a preprint in 2024 in which they present results from a survey given to “2,778 researchers who had published in top-tier artificial intelligence (AI) venues, asking for their predictions on the pace of AI progress and the nature and impacts of advanced AI systems” (Grace et al. 1) The survey asked about the likely timeline for future AI developments, as well as potential risks. The above is a sample of some of their results (Grace et al. 1). In my opinion, this would be tremendous if it’s true. The idea of AI installing wiring in a house is especially interesting to me. Until now, I’ve mostly seen AI handle computational tasks that are in the domain of digital technologies and products. So for AI to move into the “real world” and install wiring in a house, would be really interesting. The idea of AI fully automating all human jobs in ab...

Hello again! In this blog post, we will look at the technology behind “AI” as we know it today, in 2025. That is, generative AI like ChatGPT and Google Gemini. LLMs and GPT In 2017, the “transformer” architecture was proposed by Google engineers in their paper “Attention is All You Need”. This mechanism converts text to numerical representations called tokens, and each token is converted into a vector. This mechanism allows text to be predictively generated, using a large corpus of training data. In their survey paper, Roberto Gozalo-Brizuela and Eduardo C. Garrido-Merchán lay out some of the main applications of generative AI that we see today. image source First, there is the conversational use case. This is a much more advanced version of the same chatbot idea that ELIZA aimed for in the 60s. ELIZA walked so GPT chatbots could run. Personally, I use AI like an all-knowing tutor. If I have a question about anything I’m studying, AI can answer it 99.9% of the time. It may not always b...

Hi there, welcome to my blog series on AI: past, present, and future. Throughout these posts, we will look at where modern AI came from, the current state of the art, and potential future developments and consequences. As Haelan and Kaplan note in their 2019 article, the roots of AI can be traced back to the year 1942, when American writer Isaac Asimov published his short story Runaround . In this story, an advanced robot is developed by engineers and it is subject to the following Three Laws of Robotics : a robot may not injure a h uman being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; a robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; and a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. (Haenlan, Kaplan 6) If you’ve ever seen the movie I, Robot from 2004 starring Will Smith, these three laws might ring a bell! image source At around the sa...