A BRIEF HISTORY OF AI: HOW TO PREVENT ANOTHER WINTER (A CRITICAL REVIEW) Amirhosein Toosi Andrea Bottino Department of Integrative Oncology Department of Computer and Control Eng. BC Cancer Research Institute Polytechnic University of Turin Vancouver, BC, V5Z 1L3 Turin, Italy 10129
[email protected] [email protected] Babak Saboury Eliot Siegel Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences Department of Diagnostic Radiology and Nuclear Medicine National Institutes of Health University of Maryland School of Medicine Bethesda, MD 20892 Baltimore, MD 21201
[email protected] [email protected] Arman Rahmim Departments of Radiology and Physics University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC
[email protected] September 9, 2021 ABSTRACT The field of artificial intelligence (AI), regarded as one of the most enigmatic areas of science, has witnessed exponential growth in the past decade including a remarkably wide array of applications, having already impacted our everyday lives. Advances in computing power and the design of sophisticated AI algorithms have enabled computers to outperform humans in a variety of tasks, especially in the areas of computer vision and speech recognition. Yet, AI’s path has never been smooth, having essentially fallen apart twice in its lifetime (‘winters’ of AI), both after periods of popular success (‘summers’ of AI). We provide a brief rundown of AI’s evolution over the course of arXiv:2109.01517v2 [cs.AI] 8 Sep 2021 decades, highlighting its crucial moments and major turning points from inception to the present. In doing so, we attempt to learn, anticipate the future, and discuss what steps may be taken to prevent another ‘winter’.