YouSaid · the spoken record

Pamela McCorduck

lines on the record: 54
first: 2019-08-23
most recent: 2019-08-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Having a glass of wine, maybe two, and he said, What drew you to AI? And I said, Oh, you know, smartest people I knew, great project, blah, blah, blah. And I said, and I wanted something besides male smarts. And it just bubbled up out of me, Lex. And I what”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biggest thing, and it really wasn't a surprise, is how lucky I was Oh my to be To have access to the beginning of a scientific field that is going to change the world. How did I luck out? Yes, of course, my view of things has widened a lot. If I can get back to one feminist part of our conversation. Without knowing it, it really was subconscious. I wanted AI to succeed because I was so tired of hearing that intelligence was inside the male cranium. And I thought if there was something out there that wasn't a Thinking and doing well, then that would put a lie to this whole notion of intelligence resides in the male cranium. I did not know that until one night Harold Cohen and I were”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, I get asked what you worry about. And the one thing I worry about is the things that we can't anticipate. There's going to be something out of left field that we will just say, we weren't prepared for that. I am generally optimistic. When I first took up Being interested in AI Most people in the field, more intelligence was like more virtue. You know, what could be bad? In a way, I still believe that, but I realize that my notion of intelligence has broadened. There are many kinds of intelligence, and we need to imbue our machines with those many kinds.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. We have one step forward, one step back. The golden age of equality was the hardest chapter to write, and I used something from the Santa Fe Institute, which is the sandpile effect, that you drop sand very slowly onto a pile, and it grows and it grows and it grows until suddenly it just breaks apart. A way Me Too has done that. That was the last drop of sand that broke everything apart. That was a perfect example of the sandpile effect. And that made me feel good. It didn't change all of society, but it really woke a lot of people up.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm blocking on the woman who dreamed this up, but she pointed out Women were objects, not subjects. They didn't have any agency, so on and so forth. So when Elon and his pals hawking and so on came, AI is going to eat our lunch and our dinner and our midnight snack too, I thought, what? And I said to Ed Feigenfaum, oh, this is the 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. And Ed laughed. He said, I didn't think about it that way. But I did. I did. It is the male gaze Okay, suppose these things do have agency. Well, let's wait and see what happens. Can we imbue them with ethics? Can we imbue them with Sense of empathy Are they just going to be? I know we've had centuries of guys like that.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That takes up half a chapter in my book. I call it the male gaze. Well, you hear me out. The male gaze is actually a term from film criticism.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just can't. Maybe that's because I've been around the field long enough to think, you know, don't go that way. Herp Simon was terrible about making these predictions of when this and that would happen. He was a sensible guy.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Little, but I have watched my friends go through the whole issue around having help in the house Some of them have been very lucky and had fabulous help, and some of them have had people in the house who want to keep the television going on all day. Want to talk on their phones all day? No.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do, absolutely. And furthermore, I want pushing 80 now by the time I need help like that. I also want it to roll itself in a corner and shut the fuck up.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You gotta know it was a joke. I dreamed it up because I needed to talk to college students and I needed to give them some idea of what AI might be. And they were rolling in the aisles as I elaborated and elaborated and elaborated when it went into the book. They took my hide off in the New York Review of Books. This is just what we have thought about these people in AI. They're inhuman. Oh, come on, get over it.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a book I wrote with Ed Feigenbaum, there's a little story called The Geriatric Robot. How I came up with the geriatric robot is a story in itself. But here's what the geriatric robot does. It doesn't just clean you up and feed you and will you out into the sun. Advantages, it listens. It says, tell me again about the great coup of seventy three. Tell me again about how awful or how wonderful your grandchildren are and so on and so forth. And it isn't hanging around to inherit your money. It isn't hanging around because it can't get any other job. This is its job. and so on and so forth well I would love something like that.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I understand Kurzweil's view, it's sort of there's going to be this moment when machines are smarter than humans and game over. However, the game over is. I mean, do they put us under reservation? Do they, et cetera, et cetera? First of all, machines are smarter than humans in some ways all over the place. And they have been synthesic machines were invented. So it's not. It's not going to come like some great eatable crossroads, you know, where they meet each other and our offspring, Oedipus, says, Your dad. It's just not going to happen.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really don't because look at deep learning. That was a Jeffrey Hinton. came up with the algorithm in 86. But it took all these years for the technology to be good enough to actually Be applicable. No, I can't predict that at all. I can't. I wouldn't even try.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, the same kind of excitement, the same kind of this is really going to make a difference in the world. And it will. It has.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The time I'm talking about is 1990-9192, but we then, because Joe was an external faculty member, were in Santa Fe every summer. We bought a house there and I didn't have that much to do with the institute anymore. I was writing my novels, I was doing whatever I was doing. But I loved the institute and I loved Again the audacity of the ideas. That really appeals to me.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“God, just dumb. Dumb luck. I mean, this is an interesting rock to turn over. I'm going to write a book about it. And, you know, people have enough patience with writers if they think they're going to end up in a book that they let you flail around and so on.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I thought about it and I had my eye on some other project. God knows what. And I said, I'm sorry, Georgia, I'd really love to do it, but just not going to work for me at this moment. I said, oh, too bad. I think it would make an interesting book. Well, he was right and I was wrong. I wish I'd done it. But that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. That was a road not taken that I wish I'd taken.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what do you know? Herald's errand had all these kissin' cousins all over the world in science and in economics and so on and so forth. I was so relieved. I thought, okay, your instincts are okay. You're doing the right thing. I didn't have the vocabulary. And that was one of the things that the Santa Fe Institute gave me. If I could have rewritten that book, no, it had just come out. I couldn't rewrite it. I would have had a vocabulary to explain what Aaron was doing. Okay, so I got really interested in what was going on at the institute. The people were, again, bright and funny and willing to explain anything to this amateur. George Cowan, who was then the head of the institute, said he thought it might be a nice idea if I wrote a book about the institute.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I began to, the institute was very small then. It was in some kind of office complex on Old Santa Fe Trail. Everybody kept their door open. So you could crack your head on a problem. And if you finally didn't get it, you could walk in to see Stuart Kaufman or any number of people. Say, I don't get this. Can you explain? And one of the people that I was talking to about complex adaptive systems was Murray Gelmon. And I told Murray what Harold Cohen had done. And I said, you know, this sounds to me like a complex adaptive system. And he said, yeah, it is.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the last projects I did. Concerning AI in particular, was looking at the work of Harold Cohen, the painter. And Harold was deeply involved with AI. He was a painter first. And what his project Aaron, which was a lifelong project, did was Reflect his own cognitive processes Harold and I, even though I wrote a book about it, we had a lot of friction between us. I went, I thought this is it. The book died. It was published. Into a ditch. This is it. I'm finished. It's time for me to do something different. By chance, this was a sabbatical year for my husband. And we spent two months at the Santa Fe Institute and two months at Caltech. And then the spring semester in Munich, Germany. Okay. Those two months Santa Fe Institute were so restorative for me that”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, of course not. It's just as we were just talking, the symbolic. Really kind of dried up and it all became algorithmic. I remember a young AI student telling me what he was doing and I had been away from the field long enough I gotten involved with complexity at the Santa Fe Institute. I thought algorithms, yeah, they're in the service of, but they're not the main event. No, they became the main event. That surprised me. And we all know the downside of this. We all know that if you're using an algorithm to make decisions based on a gazillion human decisions baked into it are all the mistakes that humans make, the bigotries, the short-sightedness, so on and so on.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well. I admire science perhaps more than I admire commerce. Commerce is fine. Hey, you know, we all got to live. Science Has a much longer view than commerce and continues almost regardless, not It can't continue totally regardless, but almost regardless of what saleable and what's not, what's monetizable and what's not.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Science can really be killed by not getting proper funding or timely funding. I think Great Britain was a perfect example of that. The Lighthill report in Don't remember the year Essentially said there's no use Great Britain putting any money into this it's going nowhere and This was all about social factions in Great Britain. Edmund Row hated Cambridge and Cambridge hated Manchester. Somebody else can write that story. But it really did have a hard effect on research there. Now they've come roaring back with deep mind. But that's... One guy and his visionaries around him.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I look at the basic research that was being done in the 80s, which is supposed to be, my God, it was really important. It was laying down things that nobody had thought about before. But it was basic research. You couldn't monetize it. Hence the winter. You know, research, scientific research, goes in fits and starts. It isn't this nice smooth, oh, this follows this, follows this. No, it just doesn't work that way.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generally And in some ways, It hasn't worked out the way I expected so far. That is to say there is this. Wonderful lot of apps thanks to deep learning and so on. But those are algorithmic. In the part of Symbolic processing. There is very little yet. And that's a field that lies waiting for industrious graduate students.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depth. He said, but my advice would be that you choose the topic ahead of time. Fine, I said. So the following we exchanged mail over the summer. That was US post in those days because you didn't have personal email. I decided I would organize it, and there would be eight of us. Alan Null and his wife, Herb Simon and his wife, Dorothea. There was a novelist in town, a man named Mark Harris, he had just arrived, and his wife, Josephine. Mark was most famous then for a novel called Bang the Drum Slowly, which was about baseball And Joe and me, so eight people. And we met monthly. Just sank our teeth into really hard topics and it was great fun.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So on chat chat, but it was very warm. So one summer, I said to her, you know, my students have all the really interesting conversations. I was teaching at the University of Pittsburgh then in the English department. You know, they get to talk about the meaning of life and that kind of thing. And what do I have? I have university meetings where we talk about the photocopying budget and whether the course on romantic poetry should be one semester or two. So Herb laughed. He said, yes, I know what you mean. He said, but you know, you could do something about that. That was his wife. Dot and I used to have a salon at the University of Chicago every Sunday night. And we would Have essentially an open house, and people knew it wasn't for small talk. It was really for some topic of.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We both love literature and Herb had read Proust in the original French twice all the way through. I can't. I've read it in English in translation. So we talked about literature. We talked about languages. We talked about music because he loved music. We talked about art because he was actually Enough of a painter that he had to give it up because he was afraid it was interfering with his research.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Joe was working on algorithmic complexity. But he would say in plain English again and again, the smartest people I know are in AI. Oh, yes, no question. Anyway, Joe, love these guys. What happened was that I guess it was as I started to write machines who think, Herb Simon and I became very close friends. He would walk past our house on Northumberland Street every day after work, and I would just be putting my cover on my typewriter, and I would lean out the door and say Herb, would you like a sherry? And Herb almost always would like a sherry. So he'd stop in and we'd talk for an hour, two hours. My journal says we talk this afternoon for three hours.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, but you see An AI person couldn't have made that argument. He wouldn't have been believed, but Canuth was believed. Yes.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a kind of outcast period for AI. For instance, in 1974, the new field was hardly. 10 years old, the new field of computer science was asked by the National Science Foundation, I believe, but it may have been the National Academies. I can't remember, to tell, are your fellow scientists where computer science is and what it means? And they wanted to leave out AI. And they only agreed to put it in because Don Knuth said Hey, this is important. You can't just leave that out.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't worry about it. I could imagine it happening. But I think that what AI has to offer the human race will be so attractive. People will be won over.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, they give him no human solace, and he is driven away, you're right. He becomes at one point the friend of a blind man and he serves this blind man and they become very friendly. But when the sighted people of the blind man's family come in, ah, you've got a monster here. So it's very didactic in its way. And what I didn't know is that Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley were great readers of the literature surrounding abolition in the United States, the abolition of slavery. And they picked that up wholesale. You are making monsters of these people because you won't give them the respect and love that they deserve.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A villain and a hero. And the hero in most literature is human and the villain in most literature is a machine. And he said, that's just not the way it's going to be. But that's the way we're used to it. So when we tell stories about AI, it's always with this paradigm. I thought, yeah, he's right. You know, looking back the classics are you are is certainly the machines trying to overthrow the humans Frankenstein is different. Frankenstein is Creature, he never has a name. Frankenstein, of course, is the guy who created him, the human, Dr. Frankenstein. This creature wants to be loved, wants to be accepted, and it is only when Frankenstein Turns his head, in fact, runs the other way. And the creature is without love. that he becomes the monster that he later becomes.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I'm doing him right by this. He really saw it as a great boon for human beings to have this technology, and that was reason enough to do it. And he had wonderful, wonderful fables about how if you do the mathematics, you will see that these things are really good for human beings. And if you had a technological objection, he had an answer, a technological answer. But here's how we could get over that and then blah, blah, blah, blah. And one of his favorite things was what he called the literary problem, which of course he presented to me several times, that is everything in literature, there are conventions in literature. One of the conventions is that you have”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty early on, but in a different way from how I looked at it, the two cognitive psychologists, Newell and Simon, they wanted to imagine reforming cognitive psychology so that we would really, really understand the brain. Minsky was more speculative than And John McCarthy saw it as”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would say, yeah, yeah, well, you can look at the shards and say, oh, this came from this tribe and this came from this trade route and so on. But what about the big picture? And a very distinguished archaeologist said to me, they don't think that way. No, they're trying to match the shard to where it came from. Where did this corn remainder of this corn come from? Was it grown here? Was it grown elsewhere? And I think this is part of the AI, any scientific field. You're so busy doing the hard work, and it is hard work, that you don't step back and say, oh, well, now let's talk about the, you know, the general meaning of all this, yes.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ed's case, I know him well. We are dear friends, we see each other. Every month or so. He told me that when machines who think first came out, he really thought all the front matter was kind of baloney Ten years later, he said no, I see what you're getting at. Yes, this is an impulse that has been a human impulse for thousands of years to create something outside the human cranium that has intelligence I think it's very hard when you're down at the algorithmic level and you're just trying to make something work which is hard enough to step back and think of the big picture. It reminds me of when I was in Santa Fe I knew a lot of archaeologists, which was a hobby of mine”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think in a superficial way, I have, there is this notion that if we Produce a machine that can think it will outthink us and therefore replace us.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The annotated Frankenstein on my coffee table. It's a tremendous novel. It really is just beautifully perceptive. Yes, we do fear this and we have good reason to fear it. Because it can get out of hand.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I defined it this way the Hellenic point of view is robots are great. You know, they are party help. They help this guy Hephaestus, this god Hephaestus in his forge. I presume he made them to help him and so on and so forth. And they welcome the whole idea of robots. The Hebraic view has to do with, I think it's the Second Commandment thou shalt not make any graven image. In other words, you better not start imitating humans because that's just forbidden. It's the second commandment. A lot of the reaction to artificial intelligence has been a sense that this is somehow wicked. This is somehow blasphemous. We shouldn't be going there. You can say, yeah, but there are going to be some downsides. And I say, Yes, there are, but blasphemy is not one of them.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when he ran out of funding, the British government finally said that's enough. He and Lady Lovelace decided, oh, well, why don't we make, you know, why don't we play the ponies with this? He had other ideas for raising money too.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Classical scholar was pointing out to me just a few months ago. Well, you said you just read the Odyssey. The Odyssey is full of robots. It is, I said. Yeah, how do you think Odysseus' ship gets from one place to another? He doesn't have the crew people to do that, the crew men. Yeah, it's magic. It's robots. Oh, I thought how interesting. We've had this notion of AI for a long time. And then toward the end of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century, there were scientists who actually tried to make this happen some way or another, not successfully. They didn't have the technology for it. And of course, Babbage in the 1850s and 60s, he saw that what he was building was capable of intelligent behavior.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh they go back so far yes of course there's all the legendary stuff the golem and The early robots of the twentieth century But they go back much further than that. If you read Homer, Homer has robots in the Iliad”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they still wouldn't budge. I finally got a private grant without knowing who it was from, from Ed Fredkin at MIT. He was a wealthy man, and he liked what he called crackpot ideas. And he considered”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was solo. When I went to get funding for this because I needed somebody to transcribe the interviews and I needed travel expenses. I went to Everything you could think of, the NSF, the DARPA. There was an Air Force place that doled out money, and each of them said, well, that was very interesting. That's a very interesting idea. But we'll think about it. And the National Science Foundation actually said to me in plain English, hey, you're only a writer. You're not a historian of science. And I said, yeah, that's true. But, you know, the historians of science will be crawling all over this field. I'm writing for the general audience. So I thought.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Biologists are comfortable talking about the intelligence of cell, the intelligence of the brain, not just human brain, but the intelligence of any kind of brain. Cephalopods, I mean, An octopus is really intelligent by any man. We wouldn't have thought of that in the 60s, even the 70s. So all these things have worked in. And I did hear one behavioral Primatologist Franz Deval say AI taught us the questions to ask.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For those guys, I don't think so Newell and Simon were cognitive psychologists. What they wanted was Simulate aspects of human intelligence, and they found they could do it on the computer. Just thought it was a really cool thing to do. Likewise McCarthy, McCarthy had got the idea in 1949 when he was a Caltech student. And he listened to somebody's lecture. It's in my book, I forget who it was. And he thought, oh, that would be fun to do. How do we do that? And he took a very mathematical approach. Minsky was hybrid. And Newland, Simon were very much cognitive psychology. How can we simulate various things about human cognition? What happened over the many years is, of course, our definition of intelligence expanded tremendously. I mean, these days...”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The idea of intelligence outside the human cranium, this was a phenomenal idea. And even when I finished machines who think, I didn't know if they were going to succeed. In fact, the final chapter is very wishy-washy, frankly. Succeed the field did.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I had been Ed Feigenbaum's assistant at Stanford. And before that, I had worked on a book, edited by Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman called Computers and Thought. It was the first textbook of readings of AI. And 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 an article. So I was fascinated from the get-go by AI. I was an English major. You know, what did I know? Yet I was fascinated. And that's why you saw that historical, that literary background, which I think is very much a part of the continuum of AI that AI grew out of that same impulse.”
2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source