Pamela McCorduck, Historian of Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 80 (nytimes.com) 14
Pamela McCorduck, whose encounters with eminent computer scientists in the 1960s and '70s led her to write a groundbreaking history of artificial intelligence over the field's first 20 years, died on Oct. 18 at her home in Walnut Creek, Calif. She was 80. The New York Times reports: Ms. McCorduck was an English major who first ventured into the evolving world of artificial intelligence in 1960 as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, where she helped edit an influential book of academic papers about A.I. with Edward Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman, two of the field's pioneering computer scientists. Her next leap into A.I. was an immersive one at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where in the 1970s she taught English. Her husband, Joseph Traub, was head of the computer science department there, which included artificial intelligence luminaries like Herbert Simon, Allen Newell and Raj Reddy.
"She was dumped into this saturated milieu of the great and greatest in A.I. at Carnegie Mellon -- some of the same people whose papers she'd helped us assemble -- and decided to write a history of the field," Professor Feigenbaum said in a phone interview. The result was "Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry Into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence" (1979), a chronicle of past attempts to mechanize thought. She also wrote about the founders of a new science who had conceived of expert systems, speech understanding, robotics, general problem-solving and game-playing machines, beginning in the mid-1950s. Their work was considered to be the first of its kind in this area.
Artificial intelligence, she wrote, "has pervaded Western intellectual history, a dream in urgent need of being realized. Work toward that end has been a splendid effort, the variety of its forms as wondrous as anything humans have conceived, its practitioners as lively a group of poets, dreamers, holy men, rascals and eccentrics as one could hope to find -- not a dullard among them." Ms. McCorduck's "powers of observation" and "conversational style" raised her book above others that in the years since have attempted to explain artificial intelligence to a broad audience, Philip Mirowski wrote in AI Magazine in a review of the 25th-anniversary edition of "Machines Who Think," which included a long addendum updating A.I.'s history through 2004.
"She was dumped into this saturated milieu of the great and greatest in A.I. at Carnegie Mellon -- some of the same people whose papers she'd helped us assemble -- and decided to write a history of the field," Professor Feigenbaum said in a phone interview. The result was "Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry Into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence" (1979), a chronicle of past attempts to mechanize thought. She also wrote about the founders of a new science who had conceived of expert systems, speech understanding, robotics, general problem-solving and game-playing machines, beginning in the mid-1950s. Their work was considered to be the first of its kind in this area.
Artificial intelligence, she wrote, "has pervaded Western intellectual history, a dream in urgent need of being realized. Work toward that end has been a splendid effort, the variety of its forms as wondrous as anything humans have conceived, its practitioners as lively a group of poets, dreamers, holy men, rascals and eccentrics as one could hope to find -- not a dullard among them." Ms. McCorduck's "powers of observation" and "conversational style" raised her book above others that in the years since have attempted to explain artificial intelligence to a broad audience, Philip Mirowski wrote in AI Magazine in a review of the 25th-anniversary edition of "Machines Who Think," which included a long addendum updating A.I.'s history through 2004.
Machines Who Think (Score:2)
She's the author of Machines Who Think which is a fantastic history of the field from someone who has been there from the beginning. Of particular interest is the origin of the term "Artificial Intelligence" and what the people who invented the field thought about it back then.
There's a new edition now, but I'd recommend tracking down the older version if you can.
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Machines WHO think? Bitch please.
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The book was written in the 70's, it was a legitimate question back then. Some people, even today, think it's inevitable. John Von Neumann was one of the few who recognized it as nonsense early on.
Re: Machines Who Think (Score:2)
Thinking is relative. An AI that plays Chess can be considered thinking. Personally the fact AlphaGo caused a stir in the community with regard to mid game should inspire us. In this context we can say the AI was rather brilliant. But thinking in the sense of explaining those moves is far more complex. The achievements failed to be done should not diminish from what has been achieved. The goal is not simple and even Einstein rigorously tried to discredit Quantum mechanics. In fact, I think quantum computing
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An AI that plays Chess can be considered thinking.
The AI industry has an interest in keeping the myth of 'thinking machines' alive in the minds of the general public. I don't work in the field, but I have done quite a bit of graduate work in data science and machine learning. There is nothing that machines do that can be mistaken for thought.
AI is like a magic trick. All of the wonder vanishes the instant you understand what's really happening.
But thinking in the sense of explaining those moves is far more complex.
It's trivial to explain a chess move in terms of the program that produced it. Even better, unlike a human pla
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Magic vanishing because you understand it, doesn't mean it's not still somewhat wonderful. We know how fusion works in the sun and yet we are still trying to make a viable solution to it.
As you clearly outline we don't understand how the mind completely works and yet as the mind develops we can find simple patterns. A kid often is subject to reverse psychology. It's a rather simple thing to express and to manipulate but we don't deny the kid is thinking by using such a method. Instead their thought process
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The idea to stop research because "no one takes that seriously" is an absurd position within science
My point was that there is no reason to believe the quantum physics and consciousness are related that way. Penrose doesn't spend any time making a case for why he thinks that collapse events are moments of consciousness.
Exploring quantum phenomena in terms of conscience is probably the largest area of ongoing research on the subject.
I'm not a physicist, but even I know how controversial that idea is. Needless to say, I'm very skeptical of this claim. This also doesn't seem to be in the right way around. That would be consciousness causing collapse, where as Penrose's (and yours?) seems to be collapse causing consci
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This is getting interesting, so I hope you continue the thread.
To answer your question of "reason" which itself seems similar to the question of "how do magnets work", I would point you to Erwin Schrodinger's "What is Life?":
In this case it is supplied by quantum theory. In the light of
present knowledge, the mechanism of heredity is closely
related to, nay, founded on, the very basis of quantum theory.
Through the book Erin Schrodinger begins to better explain the miniscule affect quantum mechanics has on mutation and builds the basis that these changes are why heredity and evolution actually work. Of course Schrodinger is a layman in the field of biology but this work is considered t
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But my ultimate question is why doesn't it seem right to say "collapse causes consciousness" but it does seem right to say "consciousness causes collapse"? The latter seems completely absurd.
You'll need a bit of background. A quick search should point you to the Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation. The reverse, of course, is completely groundless. I point to some authors below that can answer this better than I can in a comment.
Suppose now consciousness is an emergent phenomena (which I believe we can agree is the general consensus of how consciousness forms both individually but also evolutionarily)
This is equally groundless. Some people like it because they like some of the implications, like the inevitability of strong AI, but there is absolutely no reason to think that this is the case. That idea also leads to some things that seem absurd, but are perf
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The book was written in the 70's, it was a legitimate question back then. Some people, even today, think it's inevitable. John Von Neumann was one of the few who recognized it as nonsense early on.
Or, or we can just assume that the whole phenomenon is strangely tied to lets say, the social media rise ? Which makes AI at the most 15 or 20 years old? "Let there be light....!" and all that....
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