Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI
Pamela McCorduck’s book, Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI, is a fascinating read as she provides first-hand accounting and interviews of the founding fathers who launched AI. Understanding their backgrounds and stories is thought-provoking. A download of her book can be found here: https://monoskop.org/images/1/1e/McCorduck_Pamela_Machines_Who_Think_2nd_ed.pdf
The subtitle tells the story, A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence .
Some highlights for me include:
Machines Who Think continues to be the most reliable source on the first couple of decades
Looking at the human personalities who figure in AI’s history, akin to interviewing the founding father’s of the US constitution and understanding what they thought at the time and their thinking about the most basic question of what is AI
Looking at the multi disciplined thinkers who saw the neurons of the brain and thought about how that might be mathematically represented as neural networks long before the language of deep learning
Like the author I share her human fascination with intelligent artifacts
I love her rhetorical question, do machines think? She simply writes, “This question is in a class with those snappy vaudeville comebacks: does a chicken have lips? And like them, it ought to end the discussion at once by its self-evident nonsense. “ Reminds me of being on stage with Dr David Ferrucci on a Ted talk after IBM’s historical win, see https://blog.ted.com/experts-and-ibm-insiders-break-down-watsons-jeopardy-win/ when Dr Ferrucci responded to a similar question and asked, “Do submarines swim.”
The opposing views of John von Neumann and Alan Turing as Neumann believed that computers would never be able to “think” and his why is most interesting.
Minsky’s view that the human brain is a species of a machine hence his coining of the term “meat machines.”
The insights of the planning and activities of the famous Dartmouth workshop where the term AI was coined.
Lex Fridman provides a most interesting interview , see https://lexfridman.com/pamela-mccorduck/