Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI

Lex Fridman introduces Pamela McCorduck as an author who has written about the history and philosophical significance of artificial intelligence. Her books include Machines Who Think (1979), The Fifth Generation (1983, with Ed Feigenbaum, whom he calls the father of expert systems) and The Edge of Chaos, which features women. He found her work through a line from Machines Who Think, which he paraphrases as:

artificial intelligence began with the ancient wish to forge the gods

Fridman says the line draws a connecting line between day-to-day science, math and engineering and the popular stories, science fiction and automaton myths that go back centuries. McCorduck spent a lot of time with the founders of AI from the 1956 Dartmouth summer workshop, and he reached out hoping to learn what those early days were like and how their dreams still echo in the field. He adds that having no constraints, rules or goals is a good way to discover new ideas.

Asked how the book began, McCorduck says she had been a novelist with two published novels. Sitting under the portal of a house rented for the summer at Stanford, she first thought of a novel about the odd people in AI, then decided to write a history instead, imagining it would be simple: interview them and splice the results together. It turned out to be much harder, but no one else was doing it. John McCarthy thought the idea was nutty, since the field had not yet evolved, and suggested a mathematical project. She refused, telling him:

I am not a woman in search of a project.

Fridman asks how one writes a personal history of such a young field. She saw it as wonderful that the founders were alive and able to talk about their work. They knew what they were doing was very important. Looking back, she sees that they were at the height of their research careers and finds it humbling that they made time for a woman announcing she would write a book about them.

Fridman asks who stands out from the era of the 1956 Dartmouth conference. McCorduck names the four founding fathers as Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy. All four attended Dartmouth, and Newell and Simon arrived with a working program, the Logic Theorist, while everyone else had good ideas about how it might be done but were not yet going to do it. Fridman and she also touch on others from the era, such as Joe Traub, who was not at Dartmouth.