Half a century ago, at the now famous 1956 Dartmouth Conference, the
“fathers” of Artificial Intelligence (AI) – among them John McCarthy, Marvin
Minsky, Allen Newell, Claude Shannon, Herbert Simon, Oliver Selfridge, and Ray
Solomonoff – convened under the premise “that every aspect of learning or any
other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine
can be made to simulate it.” Fifty years have passed, and AI has turned
into an important field whose influence on our daily lives can hardly be overestimated.
Many specialized AI systems exist that are at work in our cars, in our
laptop computers, and in our personal and commercial technologies. There is no
doubt that the impact of AI on our lives in the future will become even more
general and ubiquitous.