Artificial Intelligence, Soongsil, and Our Future

     I remember contributing an article to the Soongsil Times on the theme of Soongsil and AI (Artificial Intelligence) upon the request of a reporter during my Ph.D. course, majoring in artificial intelligence, in 2006. Fifteen years has passed since. During that time, AI was a new technology and a hot topic of public interest. As of 2021, interest AI has increased. Now, students who are not IT majors are also very interested in AI. When teaching humanities students AIrelated courses, I can feel their enthusiasm in studying new fields rather than outright rejection.

     Can computers think by themselves? How does one evaluate the intelligence of a machine? There are many people who think this question is very recent in a highly developed era. However, these subjects were actively studied since the 1950s. Alan Turing published a paper titled Computing Machine and Intelligence in 1950, predicting the possibility of thinking machines. In this paper, he proposed a method of evaluating the intelligence of AI machines that will emerge in the future, called the Turing Test.

     The term ‘AI’ is also an old term established at the Dartmouth Conference in 1956. Deep learning, known as a representative algorithm in the field of machine learning, is usually known as a new algorithm, published in the wake of the AlphaGo system. However, the basic model of deep learning was published in the 1970s, and has already been utilized for decades. It was devised in 1957 for its early model, the Perceptron algorithm. Most machine learning algorithms, such as genetic algorithms, fuzzy algorithms, and machine learning algorithms of reinforcement learnings, began to be developed and utilized between 1960 and 1990. This way, research on AI that allows machines to think like humans has been conducted for a very long time than we expected.

     Since such AI research has actually been trapped in the field of scientists’ research for decades, the general public could not grasp the history of its development properly. However, these algorithms are now entering the real world and the real life from the closed field of research. It has a practical impact on your life. In fact, we are living with AI unconsciously. Video content systems, such as YouTube and Netflix, identify each person’s tastes and recommend appropriate content based on past viewing records. Shopping malls, such as Amazon and Coupang, predict and recommend products that can be purchased in the future based on your search terms and past purchase history. In the medical field, it helps doctors diagnose diseases more accurately, and commercial systems that chat, consult, or talk with voice on behalf of people are also appearing.

     Now, we have a new task on the subject of AI, both as professors and students. AI used to be a research area for specific detailed majors in the past, but, now, its function as a tool that is necessary for everyone is growing. In other words, even if one’s major is not in the IT field, the ability to use AI as a tool is essential in one’s major. Professors should think about how to teach AI to Soongsilians, and come up with good lectures. Soongsilians should also develop themselves as talents required by the era of AI through extra-curricular activities. SSU established the first Department of Electronic Computing in Korea in 1970, and has a proud history of opening the first Department of AI in Korea in 1992. I salute them as innovators, and support Soongsilians who are moving forward to the best of their abilities.

Kim Wan-seop

(Professor, Baird College of General Education)