This Could Be Important: My Life and Times With the Artificial Intelligentsia

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[Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives] Pamela McCorduck wrote the first modern history of artificial intelligence, Machines Who Think, and spent much time pulling on the sleeves of public intellectuals, trying in futility to suggest that artificial intelligence could be important. Memoir, social history, group biography of the founding fathers of AI, This Could Be Important follows the personal story of one AI spectator, from her early enthusiasms to her mature, more nuanced observations of the field. --- In 1979 Pamela McCorduck published the first modern history of artificial intelligence, Machines Who Think. But as This Could Be Important shows, she’d been intrigued by AI for nearly twenty years before that. She’d first met AI when she was an undergraduate English major at Berkeley, and became steeped in the culture at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon Universities. While she couldn’t judge whether AI was sound science, or would ever move from the fringes to scientific respectability, she was confident that the people who pursued AI were some of the most intelligent human beings she’d ever had the joy to meet. Friendships with the AI founding fathers, first professional, and later personal, laid the foundation of her lifelong fascination with AI. When she and her computer scientist husband moved to New York City, she joined various literary circles, but faced impossible battles to convince public intellectuals in the 1980s, the 1990s, and beyond, that AI could be important. Drawn from the journals she kept, she describes those battles candidly—losing a university tenure fight over Machines Who Think (which was later celebrated as influencing a generation of young researchers), being flayed alive in the New York Times and the New York Review of Books for her heresies. She writes how she was aghast and then contemptuous of one celebrity intellectual’s ignorance, dismayed by others for their unwillingness to try even to understand. Yet AI is here, and so is she. If she once thought that pursuing more intelligence was as unequivocally desirable as pursuing more virtue, she awakened to what, as a student of the humanities, she should always have known—that any human endeavor brings in its train the sublime and the ridiculous, opportunities for great good, and risks of great evil. In this book she also ponders the present, where two global super-powers, the United States and China, have at their disposal a power never before seen in human history. Neither one will get it right the first time. But with due caution, AI can be done right. A Note On Open Access The ETC Press is Gold Open Access publisher, which means we make a free version of our publication available through our repository. We will continue that practice with Pamela’s book. However, University Archivist Julia Corrin and ETC Press & University Libraries Editorial Director Brad King are building a mobile, interactive version of this book, which you can access here. We will have a version of the book up before the end of 2019, and then we will continue to build interactivity into this book as more of Pamela’s papers become available to use. HTML edition: https://thiscouldbeimportantbook.pressbooks.com/ I. The Two Cultures 1. Living in the Exponential 2. The Capacious Structure of Computational Rationality, Fast and Slow Thinking, an Intelligence Continuum 3. The Two Cultures 4. Thinking, Then and Now 5. Learning a New Way of Thinking at Stanford 6. Revolution in the Rust Belt II. Part Two: Brains 7. Machines Who Think Is Conceived; John McCarthy Says Okay 8. Over Christmas, We Invented a Thinking Machine 9. What the First Thinking Machine Thought 10. Herbert Simon 11. Allen Newell 12. The MIT Group 13. Edward Feigenbaum 14. Raj Reddy and the Dawn of Machine Learning III. Part Three: Culture Clash 15. Whiplashed by the Manichean Struggle Between the Two Cultures 16. A Turning Point 17. Dissenters IV. 18. Photo Gallery V. Part Four: The World Discovers Artificial Intelligence 19. Japan Wakes the World Up to AI 20. Stragglers from the Wreck of Time 21. A Long Dance with IBM 22. Being a Nine-Day Wonder 23. Breaking and Entering into the House of the Humanities VI. Part Five: Silicon Valley Sketchbook 24. The Silicon Valley Sketchbook VII. Part Six: Arts and Letters 25. Art and Artificial Intelligence 26. The Story as the Marker of Human Intelligence? 27. The Digital Humanities 28. Humanities Now and Forever VIII. Part Seven: And Wherefore Was It Glorious? 29. Elegies 30. The Male Gaze 31. A Dark Horse Comes Out of Nowhere 32. Doing the Right Things 33. This Could Be Important References Acknowledgments About the Author About the ETC Press