A.I. can be considered as the ultimate achievement in terms of computer sciences. John McCarthy defined the term as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines". How far the current state of sciences is in this field is hard to say, since significant advances would be classified, and the general oublic would only hear of it after more significant progresses are made…

The development of AI is not limited to a certain field, it covers incredibly vast territories of human knowledge, such as psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, optimization, logic, robotics, control systems, etc…

The idea of artificial intelligence is not recent. It appears in early Greek mythology, where the earliest known robots were sacred statues worshipped in Egypt and Greece, which were believed to have been endowed with self-awareness by craftsmen. Paracelsus in medieval times claimed to have created artificial beings. Yan Shi and Wolfgang von Kempelen are only a few who have built different mechanical interpretations of human beings.

Science fiction has been long preoccupied by this matter and countless stories have been written of supercomputers gaining self-consciousness, the ability to evolve themselves at an incredible rate and having aspirations for world domination. There are, however some estimations based on extrapolated logarithmical expressions (...), such as Moore's law, which predicts exponential development in digital technology. Futurist-scientist Ray Kurzweil has calculated that PC's will have the same computing power as the human brain by 2029, and that by 2040 artificial intelligence will reach a point where it is able to improve itself rapidly, a phenomena which Vernor Vinge named the "technological singularity".

Ethical questions have been raised, that if the human brain with all its features (for e.g. emotions) could be simulated, than the machine at hand should or should not be given human rights. Well, if we give a little thought to it, this is a little premature discussion. Real A.I. should be created first, and then questions asked.

Future possibilities are immense. From intelligent organic implants to improve human properties, to stand-alone android type robots, supercomputers, cyborgs and countless other yet unknown applications, A.I. could mean serious improvements, or the scenario we've seen in The Matrix trilogy, the Terminator trilogy and other movies of this genre.