The emergence and evolution of urban AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) emerged alongside the development of the digital computer more than 80 years ago during the second world war. The essential logic for representing a variety of phenomena using the binary code enabled a range of numerical problems, hitherto beyond solution, to be addressed. New technologies based on electrical switching that rapidly grew out of analogies with mechanical switching formed the essence of these computers but behind this technology lay philosophic foundations that paved the way for speculations that a new form of AI might be possible. Alan Turing, one of the architects of this philosophy, along with John von Neumann, argued that our ability to represent many phenomena using binary codes, suggested that the digital computer was a ‘universal machine’ and in this sense held out “ … hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields” (Turing 1950). …