The 1990s from the perspective of Artificial Intelligence

 

Describing the current situation in AI and robotics is nearly impossible. There are endless amount of projects and documentation available and at least once a week a new robot is shown at youtube which looks more human like than in the week before. Advanced topics like biped walking, speech understanding and playing of videogames are solved already or the chance is high that within the next 12 months such a success story will become visible and fiction and reality have merged to a complex media campaign. Is it not clear if a certain robot head is remote controlled or by an advanced algorithm or if a certain walking robot was able to do the steps in reality or it was drawn into the picture with animation technology.

If the current world is too complex it makes sense to increase the distance and observe something which has a clear frame around it. The 1990s are a great decade for describing artificial intelligence. The major advantage is that the amount of published books is known and that the level of technology in the 1990s was low. Biped robots weren't invented, chess machines were not able to beat the best human player (with a single exception invented by IBM) and most researchers were not sure if AI can be realized in the future.

Computer technology in the 1990s was in an early stage and most problems were located in slow hardware and bugs in the software.. Windows 95 was during that period a common operating system, and the internet was in the early beginning. This setup makes it easy to give a full overview about all robots and AI projects during this time.

Basically spoken, AI wasn't realized in the 1990s but it was a philosophical topic. The question was if experts in computer science think about how realistic AI will be in the future. That means 95% of the population wasn't informed about the subject at all, and the few computer experts who have used neural networks and expert system in reality were not able to demonstrate practical applications.

Artificial Intelligence in the 1990s was mostly a subject for movies and science fiction books. Lots of stories about intelligent robots were available in this period. Even it was not possible to build real robots it was within reach to imagine a future in which positronic brains and other technology allows humans in doing so.