In as early as the 1960s, top thinkers were predicting machines would take over a person’s work.
That’s according to the Science Center of Iowa’s newest traveling exhibit, “Artificial Intelligence: Your Mind & The Machine.” The interactive exhibit will be on display through April 26.
“Machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work that a man can do,” according to Herbert Simon, Nobel laureate, in 1960.
The exhibit walks the viewer through early attempts at AI, such as playing chess in the 1950s and 1960s, to where it is today, with generative AI, machine translation, machine learning, self driving cars and large language models.
AI is “one of the most disruptive and rapidly changing things that our species has ever dealt with,” said Rob Burnett, the Science Center’s vice president of science learning. “We felt a lot of urgency to make sure that we had a very informed populace to understand the very real risks, opportunities and things that we can’t even imagine right now that we’ll need to deal with.”
Designed for visitors of all ages, the exhibitbreaks down complex concepts into hands-on experiences that introduce what artificial intelligence is, how machines learn and where AI shows up in everyday life. Visitors can explore facial recognition technology, experiment with AI-generated art and interact with exhibits that compare machine learning to the human brain.
Created by the Relayer Group, the exhibitis one of the first major museum exhibitions to focus on the real-world relevance of AI. The exhibit explores applications ranging from virtual assistants and self-driving vehicles to creative tools and data analysis, helping visitors connect emerging technology to familiar experiences.
Burnett said he hopes the exhibit spurs questions – about data centers, tech companies and more.
“I think the biggest thing that people should be asking about data centers right now is, what is their true purpose?” he said. “What are they truly fueling? I think there’s a big misconception right now that that is just all AI, but everything from cloud computing, every click, every video that we watch on YouTube, everything that gets fed to us in all the ways of streaming, it’s a much larger conversation on what these data centers are doing for us.”
“We’re in a new arms race without an enemy, in the way that different governments and companies are investing everything into AI right now,” he said.
AI’s initial entrance into the market was more of a sputter, according to the exhibit. AI was introduced into products in the 1980s, but “it could only do very specific things [and] the expectations then were that it should do more,” according to the exhibit.
The original AI business failed around 1994 and more than 300 companies went out of business.
“The use of neural networks, and several excellent game-playing AIs, helped bring AI back to the spotlight in the 21st century,” it said.
Burnett said he’s aiming to have “the most informed community that we can, because there are lots of very real questions that should be being asked right now. There are lots of very real solutions that could be helped or hindered by an informed populace just having a greater understanding. And I think this exhibit does an excellent job of reminding us the historical nature of this, like basically back to recorded history.”
AI development started in the 1950s, he said, with basic programming questions.
“That idea has been there for a long time,” he said.
But most people are not ready to forecast what AI could mean for them.
“We’ve been through big disruptors before. … Nothing that I’ve been able to find compares to this in the rapidity of change and the big disruption,” he said.