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

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1. “Alan Newell, Herbert Simon, Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, they were the four who were not only at the Dartmouth Conference, but Nulan Simon arrived there with a working program called the Logic Theorist. Everybody else had great ideas about how they might do it, but They weren't going to do it yet. You mentioned Joe Traub, my husband. I was immersed in AI before I met Joe”

   2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Oh yeah, they knew what they were doing was very important, very 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 to talk to this woman who said, I think I'm going to write a book about you. No, it was amazing, just amazing.”

   2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “People who, 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. This is what I want to do. I hope you'll cooperate. And he said, oh, MutterMutter, well, okay, it's your time.”

   2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “I had been a novelist I'd publish two novels, and I was sitting. Under the Portal at Stanford one day, 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. Nobody else was doing it. And so I thought, well, this is a great opportunity. And there were”

   2019-08-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source