Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has been front and center recently, creating great interest in companies like Nvidia, which now ranks among the most valuable companies in the world.
But where does this technology rank among others that have enabled our digital world? The most far-reaching prior innovations were mainly based on electronic devices that enabled increasingly powerful computer and communications systems.
It all started with the transistor, which was invented in 1946 and is the seed invention of our digital electronic age. In various forms, the transistor, which replaced vacuum tube devices, is the solid-state device enabling all electronic systems.
Because of its scalability, reliability and low switching power dissipation, it enabled reliable computing systems that would have been impossible using prior vacuum tube devices.
In the 1960s, the second key invention came: the integrated circuit, which combined multiple interconnected transistors on a silicon chip. This invention, which has grown from a few transistors on a chip to billions today, is the core of practically all current electronic systems.
The desired functionality of the system based on transistor interconnections determines the architecture of the chips.
Powerful computing systems require high-speed interconnections, and the invention of lasers and fiber optics solved this problem. The most widely used lasers developed in the 1970s were semiconductor lasers that enabled data communications by high-data-rate fiber optic-based data transmission.
Optical fibers enable transmitting digital data with high-frequency light pulses over thousands of kilometers. Today, fiber optic communications, along with wireless systems, dominate digital communication.
The emergence of the Internet in the 1990s completed the infrastructure development enabling ubiquitous consumer and commercial communications globally.
While computer software technology advanced, it did not keep pace with rapid advances in systems, which resulted in a rapid increase in data. As a result, the world’s systems generated immense amounts of data that were not useful. Better methods were needed to organize and use data.
Recognizing limitations in existing technology, academic work has been ongoing since the 1950s to adapt concepts about the unique capabilities of the human brain to computer systems.
The human brain operates on the basis of an immense number of distributed elements (neurons) that communicate as needed to manage human operations.
The idea that became the basis of AI technology was that computer data processing should emulate that of the human brain – “neural processing”– as opposed to the linear processing technique used.
It was believed that such processing would make it possible to access and organize information using computer power much more efficiently. However, practical results were slow to come.
In effect, the proposed AI systems relied on massive parallel data processing. What was needed to build useful systems was enough processing capability, powered by an enormous number of processing transistors.
Decades of research on such systems and algorithms were conducted with little practical impact. Finally, with the integrated circuit performance improving along Moore’s Law, it became possible to build useful AI systems (with Nvidia in the processing device leadership) and really remarkable data processing results were demonstrated. Hence the prevailing public excitement.
But is all the excitement warranted? In my opinion, AI deserves a rank alongside the major prior digital technology innovations. AI enables an enormous improvement in the use and value of data. It does not create new knowledge but can see patterns in data that would otherwise remain hidden.
AI does not invent but can stimulate human invention by bringing hidden relationships to light. Finally, it can interact with humans in real time to enable functions that would be error-prone with current systems.
No, it does not endow computers with human intelligence, but it enables human intelligence to operate at new levels of performance.
Henry Kressel is a technologist, inventor, business executive and author who has created many important innovations, including pioneering practical semiconductor lasers. He is also a long-term private equity investor in technology companies.