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

1. 0:00 – 52:05

   Intro

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      The following is a conversation with Pamela McCorduck. She's an author who has written on the history and the philosophical significance of artificial intelligence. Her books include Machines Who Think in 1979, The Fifth Generation in 1983 with Ed Feigenbaum, who's considered to be the father of expert systems, The Edge of Chaos, The Futures of Women, and many more books. I came across her work in an unusual way, by stumbling on a quote from Machines Who Think that is something like, "Artificial intelligence began with the ancient wish to forge the gods." That was a beautiful way to draw a connecting line between our societal relationship with AI, from the grounded day-to-day science, math and engineering, to popular stories and science fiction and myths of automatons that go back for centuries. Through her literary work, she has spent a lot of time with the seminal figures of artificial intelligence, including the founding fathers of AI from the 1956 Dartmouth summer workshop where the field was launched. I reached out to Pamela for a conversation in hopes of getting a sense of what those early days were like, and how their dreams continue to reverberate through the work of our community today. I often don't know where the conversation may take us, but I jump in and see. Having no constraints, rules or goals is a wonderful way to discover new ideas. This is the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give it five stars on iTunes, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter @lexfridman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N. And now, here's my conversation with Pamela McCorduck. In 1979, your book, Machines Who Think was published. In it, you interview some of the early AI pioneers and explore the idea that AI was born not out of maybe math and computer science, but out of myth and legend.

   2. PMPamela McCorduck2:08

      (laughs)

   3. LFLex Fridman2:09

      (laughs) So, uh, tell me if you could the story of how you first arrived at the book, the journey of-

   4. PMPamela McCorduck2:16

      Oh.

   5. LFLex Fridman2:17

      ... beginning to write it.

   6. PMPamela McCorduck2:20

      I had been a novelist. I'd published two novels. And I was sitting, uh, under, uh, the portal at Stanford one day in the house we were renting for the summer, and I thought, "I should write a novel about these weird people in AI I know." And then I thought, "Ah, don't write a novel. Write a history. Simple. Just go around, you know, interview them, splice it together. Voila, instant book. Ha, ha, ha." It was much harder than that. (laughs) But nobody else was doing it. And so I thought, "Well, this is a great opportunity." And there were people who, uh, John McCarthy for example, thought it was a nutty idea. There were much... You know, the field had not evolved yet, so on. And he had some mathematical thing he thought I should write instead. And I said, "No, John. I am not a woman in search of a project. I'm... This is what I want to do. I hope you'll cooperate." And he said, "Oh, mutter mutter. Well, okay. It's your, your time." And-

   7. LFLex Fridman3:25

      What was the pitch for the... I mean, such a young field at that point. How do you write a personal history of a field that's so young?

   8. PMPamela McCorduck3:34

      I said, "This is wonderful. The founders of the field are alive and kicking and able to talk about what they're doing."

   9. LFLex Fridman3:41

      Did they sound or feel like founders at the time? Did they know that they've been found- that they had founded something?

   10. PMPamela McCorduck3:48

       Oh, yeah. They knew what they were doing was very important, very. What they... Uh, what I now see in retrospect is that they were at the height of their research careers. And it's humbling to me that they took time out from all the things that they had to do as a consequence of being there, and to talk to this woman who said, "I think I'm going to write a book about you." (laughs) No, it was amazing, just amazing.

   11. LFLex Fridman4:17

       So who, who stands out to you, uh, maybe looking 63 years ago at the Dartmouth conference? The, so Marvin Minsky was there, McCarthy was there, Claude Shannon, Allen Newell, Herb Simon, some of the folks you've mentioned.

   12. PMPamela McCorduck4:34

       Right.

   13. LFLex Fridman4:35

       Um, then there's the other characters, right? Um, the one, one of your co-authors.

   14. PMPamela McCorduck4:40

       (laughs)

   15. LFLex Fridman4:41

       Uh, uh, uh-

   16. PMPamela McCorduck4:42

       He wasn't at Dartmouth.

   17. LFLex Fridman4:43

       He wasn't at Dartmouth.

   18. PMPamela McCorduck4:44

       No.

   19. LFLex Fridman4:44

       But I mean, in general.

   20. PMPamela McCorduck4:44

       He was, I think an undergraduate then.

   21. LFLex Fridman4:47

       (laughs) And, uh, and of course Joe Traub. I mean, all of these are players, not at Dartmouth, but, uh, in that era.

   22. PMPamela McCorduck4:56

       Right.

   23. LFLex Fridman4:56

       Uh, and C- CMU and so on. So who are the characters, if you could paint a picture, that stand out to you from memory? Those people you've interviewed and maybe not, people that were just in the...

   24. PMPamela McCorduck5:08

       In the am- the atmosphere.

   25. LFLex Fridman5:10

       In the atmosphere.

   26. PMPamela McCorduck5:11

       Uh, of course the four founding fathers were extraordinary guys. They really were.

   27. LFLex Fridman5:16

       Who are the founding fathers?

   28. PMPamela McCorduck5:18

       Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy. They were the four who were not only at the Dartmouth conference, but Newell and Simon arrived there with a working program, uh, called the Logic Theorist. Everybody else had great ideas about how they might do it, but they weren't gonna do it yet. Um, and you mentioned Joe Traub, my husband. I, I was immersed in AI before I met Joe, because I had been Ed Feigenbaum's assistant at Stanford. And before that, I had worked on a book by, edited by Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman called...... Computers and Thought. It was the first textbook of readings of AI. And they, they only did it because they were trying to teach AI to people at Berkeley, and there was nothing... You know, you'd have to send them to this journal and that journal. This was not the internet where you could go look at a, an article. So I was fascinated from the get-go by AI. I was an En- English major, you know, what did I know? And, uh, yet I was fascinated. And that's why you saw that historical, that literary background, which I, I think is very much a part of the continuum of AI. That, uh, that AI grew out of that same impulse.

   29. LFLex Fridman6:45

       Was that, yeah, that traditional. What, what was, what drew you to AI? How did you even think of it back, back then?

   30. PMPamela McCorduck6:53

       (laughs)
2. 52:05 – 1:00:13

   Existential threats and the male gaze

   1. PMPamela McCorduck52:05

   2. LFLex Fridman52:05

      Yeah. Do you have concerns about, um, about AI, the existential threats as many people, like Elon Musk and, and, uh, Sam Harris and others that are thinking about-

   3. PMPamela McCorduck52:19

      Oh, yeah, yeah. Hmm, that takes up a half a chapter in my book.

   4. LFLex Fridman52:25

      (laughs)

   5. PMPamela McCorduck52:25

      I call it the male gaze.

   6. LFLex Fridman52:27

      (laughs) Yeah.

   7. PMPamela McCorduck52:29

      Well, uh, y- hear me out.

   8. LFLex Fridman52:31

      Yeah.

   9. PMPamela McCorduck52:31

      Um, the male gaze is actually a term from film criticism. And I'm blocking on the womans who dreamed this up, but she pointed out how most movies were made from the male point of view, that women were objects not subjects, they didn't have any, uh, agency, so on and so forth. So when Elon and his pals-

   10. LFLex Fridman52:59

       (laughs)

   11. PMPamela McCorduck52:59

       ... Hawking and so on came, "AI's gonna eat our lunch and our dinner and our midnight snack too," I thought, "What?" And I said to Ed Feigenbaum, "Ah, this is the first gu- first, these guys have always been the smartest guy on the block, and here comes something that might be smarter. Ooh, let's stamp it out before it takes over."

   12. LFLex Fridman53:21

       (laughs)

   13. PMPamela McCorduck53:21

       And Ed laughed, he said, "I didn't think about it that way." But I did, I did. And it is the male gaze, you know? Okay, suppose these things do have agency. Well, let's wait and see what happens.

   14. LFLex Fridman53:37

       Okay. (laughs)

   15. PMPamela McCorduck53:38

       Can we imbue them with ethics? Can we imbue them with a sense of empathy? Or are they just gonna be, "Uh." I know we've had centuries of guys like that.

   16. LFLex Fridman53:55

       (laughs) That's interesting that, um, the, the ego, uh, the m- the male gaze is immediately threatened, and so you can't think in a patient-

   17. PMPamela McCorduck54:07

       (laughs)

   18. LFLex Fridman54:08

       ... calm way of, of, uh, how the tech could evolve. I mean, s- speaking of which, your '96 book, The Future of Women-

   19. PMPamela McCorduck54:17

       Oh.

   20. LFLex Fridman54:18

       ... I think at the time, and now, certainly now, I mean, I'm sorry, maybe at the time, but I'm more cognizant of now, is, uh, extremely relevant. You and Nancy Ramsey talk about four possible futures-

   21. PMPamela McCorduck54:32

       Right.

   22. LFLex Fridman54:32

       ... of women in science and tech. So if we look at the decades before and after the book was released, can you tell a history, sorry, of women in science and tech-

   23. PMPamela McCorduck54:46

       Oh, boy.

   24. LFLex Fridman54:46

       ... and how it has evolved?How have things changed? Where do we stand?

   25. PMPamela McCorduck54:51

       Not enough. (laughs) They have not changed enough. Uh, the way that women are ground down (laughs) in computing is simply unbelievable.

   26. LFLex Fridman55:04

       But what are the four possible futures for women-

   27. PMPamela McCorduck55:08

       Oh.

   28. LFLex Fridman55:08

       ... in tech from the book?

   29. PMPamela McCorduck55:10

       What you're really looking at are various aspects of the present. So for each of those, you could say, "Oh, yeah. We do have backlash. Look at what's happening with abortion and so on and so forth."

   30. LFLex Fridman55:24

       Mm-hmm.

Episode duration: 1:00:06