Kim-Note

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the modern Digital Age is as revolutionary as it is feared. It is “a fast evolving family of technologies that can bring a wide array of economic and societal benefits across the entire spectrum of industries and social activities.” These technologies are expected to fuel sectors “including environment and health, the public sector, finance, mobility, home affairs, and agriculture.” Digital (social) media and AI development continue to transform the contours of the 21st century. “Information society services and especially intermediary services have become an important part of the . . . economy and the daily life of . . . citizens.” However, the emergence of these technologies is far from a novel concept; both have been around for decades, seeping into mainstream prominence and steadily evolving and changing the way society, businesses, and governments interact. The first concept of AI traces back to the 1950s when British polymath, Alan Mathison Turing, who is now regarded as “the father of AI,” posed the question of whether machines could think. John McCarthy, a professor at Dartmouth College, later coined the term “artificial intelligence” and its subsequent acronym where the colloquial use of AI is now both standard and popular vernacular. By the mid-1960s, AI research in the United States (US) gained institutional acknowledgment in the form of funding from the Department of Defense (DOD) and private laboratories. With the Cold War backdrop, the internet as we know it began to take shape with the development of the DOD’s communications systems project, Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). A few decades later, with the dot-com bubble, the internet boomed with widespread public accessibility, ushering in the era of digital platforms that define and influence the global state of the current world. Significant modern milestones started with computers and machine learning algorithms such as IBM’s “Deep Blue” chess-playing program and rapidly evolved into Windows’ speech recognition software, robot vacuums, digital assistants (e.g., Apple’s Siri), driverless cars, and advanced chatbots like ChatGPT. Today, AI dominates the global digital landscape, permeating multifarious aspects of everyday life and fundamentally reshaping how the public, private, and government sectors operate.