According to [1] there was a system in 1968 that “consistently outperformed humans when presented with the same recognition tasks”.
As someone who was into programming and electronics in the eighties, I also feel a need to object whenever people say things like “we thought it was AI until we could make a computer do it, and now it’s just math” (paraphrasing).
We (those of us interested in the subject back then) had a pretty good idea about what would be possible in the future (because of faster machines and more storage) and what would not be possible in the future (unless a breakthrough was made in understanding intelligence).
Now, I do think we underestimated how fast things have developed, and especially the resources people have access today via the internet, but none of what I have seen today would have been classified as AI by myself back in the eighties.
I also mucked around with computers in the 80s and agree with most of that. I guess a lot of whether stuff is AI comes down to how you define it. The Oxford English Dict has:
>[mass noun] The theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.
So obviously by that speech and Zucks type of face recognition are AI. I note the '68 system was hybrid and required humans to measure the faces and enter data for where the features are so it was more analysing numbers.
As someone who was into programming and electronics in the eighties, I also feel a need to object whenever people say things like “we thought it was AI until we could make a computer do it, and now it’s just math” (paraphrasing).
We (those of us interested in the subject back then) had a pretty good idea about what would be possible in the future (because of faster machines and more storage) and what would not be possible in the future (unless a breakthrough was made in understanding intelligence).
Now, I do think we underestimated how fast things have developed, and especially the resources people have access today via the internet, but none of what I have seen today would have been classified as AI by myself back in the eighties.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_recognition_system#Hist...