Pamela McCorduck, Historian of Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 80

It reminds me how young AI and computing are as fields still that there are so many people still alive from the misty predawn eras like McCorduck. To put her life in perspective, in 1960 when she started, the term "artificial intelligence" had just been coined 4 years before, checkers programs still couldn't beat an amateur, the very first automated theorem provers were being written, McCarthy had just published his theoretical LISP paper and was about to be surprised by Russell pointing out it could be directly implemented by an interpreter, ELIZA wouldn't be written for another 4 years, backprop wouldn't be well-known for decades, DeepBlue was almost half a century away... But she lived to see not just the deep learning revolution but AlphaGo/MuZero, GPT-3, CLIP, Codex etc.

Sad news. RIP, Ms. McCorduck.

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.

I was first introduced to her name when I read a book she co-wrote along with Ed Feigenbaum - The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan's Computer Challenge to the World[1]. It took me a while to later realize that she also wrote another book that was sitting on my shelf waiting to be read. That being Machines Who Think. I feel a bit sad now in acknowledging that the book is still sitting there waiting to be read. :-(

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Artificial-Intellige...