An article in regards to the concept of artificial intelligence (AI) by Nineteenth-century inventor Nikola Tesla, who’s referred to as a genius who predicted the arrival of wireless communication and the Web, and was ahead of his time, is a hot topic.

Fox News reported on the tenth (local time) that the Tesla Science Center re-edited and published a newspaper article by Nikola Tesla containing the concept of recent AI. That is an article published within the media called The Century Magazine in america in June 1900.

In this text, titled ‘The Problem of Growing Human Energy Demand’, Tesla writes, “I need to indicate that an automaton with its own mind will be devised, even when it seems inconceivable now.”

“Which means the device will probably be independent of the operator and can have the option to perform a wide selection of actions and tasks as if it had intelligence while responding to external stimuli by itself,” he explained.

“It could follow a pre-determined course or follow a given command,” he wrote, “and it would have the option to differentiate between what to do and what to not do.” Together with this, he added, “you may have an experience that will certainly influence your next motion, or record your impressions as an alternative.”

Which means a conscious machine performs tasks while learning, and is conceptually near autonomous artificial intelligence, ‘general purpose artificial intelligence (AGI)’. Joseph Sikorsky, a research fellow on the Tesla Science Center, interpreted that “Tesla foresaw the age of machines that think independently of humans.”

Tesla, who was an Austrian of Serbian descent, went to america and succeeded in commercializing alternating current electricity, and left a terrific mark in electrical engineering by inventing the Tesla coil and developing a radio. Specifically, he was a genius scientist who devised early-stage technology for wireless communication or radar and proposed the SETI program to look for extraterrestrial civilizations by receiving radio waves from space.

Reporter Jeong Byeong-il jbi@aitimes.com