Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #34

Pamela McCorduck describes how, as an English major and novelist, she came to write Machines Who Think, the first personal history of AI, by interviewing its founders while they were still at the height of their careers. She traces AI's roots back through Frankenstein, the Golem, and even robots in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, distinguishing the welcoming Hellenic view of robots from the blasphemy-fearing Hebraic view. She shares warm personal memories of figures like Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, and Edward Feigenbaum, and her time at the Santa Fe Institute studying complexity. McCorduck argues the 'AI winter' is a commerce problem, not a science problem, and reframes existential-threat fears as a defensive 'male gaze.' She closes by revealing she was drawn to AI partly to disprove the idea that intelligence resides only in the male cranium.

• After being rejected by NSF, DARPA and others, McCorduck finally funded Machines Who Think with a private grant from Ed Fredkin of MIT, who liked 'crackpot ideas.'
  00:10:29
• She argues robots appear far earlier than the Golem, citing Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, where Odysseus's ship is essentially crewed by magic robots.
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• McCorduck rejects the AI winter as a 'crock,' arguing winters are a commerce phenomenon while science continues almost regardless of funding.
  00:33:16
• She reframes existential-threat AI fears from Musk, Hawking and others as 'the male gaze' — men threatened that something might be smarter than them.
  00:52:17
• She reveals she subconsciously wanted AI to succeed to disprove the notion that intelligence resides inside the male cranium.
  00:58:38
• She describes inventing the 'geriatric robot' as a joke for students, which critics in the New York Review of Books used to condemn AI people as inhuman.
  00:47:27

• McCorduck was a published novelist before she decided to write a history of AI rather than a novel about the field.
  00:02:06
• The four founding fathers she names are Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy, all at the 1956 Dartmouth conference.
  00:05:14
• Before Machines Who Think she worked on Computers and Thought, the first textbook of readings in AI, edited by Feigenbaum and Feldman.
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• In 1974 a report on computer science nearly left out AI entirely; AI was only included because Don Knuth insisted it was important.
  00:24:16
• Herbert Simon would stop by her house for sherry and they'd talk for hours about literature, music and art — Simon read Proust twice in the original French.
  00:25:48
• She frames the AI winter as the difference between science and commerce, citing Britain's Lighthill report as science killed by funding politics.
  00:32:45
• At the early Santa Fe Institute everyone kept their doors open; Murray Gell-Mann helped her see Harold Cohen's painting program AARON as a complex adaptive system.
  00:39:38
• She is not a fan of Kurzweil's singularity, arguing machines have already been smarter than humans in some ways since adding machines were invented.
  00:45:22

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