Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think and the Early Days of AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #34
the following is a conversation with Pamela Romo quartic she's an author who is written on the history and the philosophical significance of artificial intelligence her books include machines who think in 1979 the fifth generation in 1983 with Edie foggy and mom who's considered to be the father of expert systems the edge of chaos the features of women and many more books I came across her work in an unusual way by stumbling in a quote for machines who think that is something like artificial intelligence began with the ancient wish to forged the gods that was a beautiful way to draw connecting line between our societal relationship with AI from the grounded day to day science math and engineering to popular stories and science fiction and myths of automatons that go back for centuries through her literary work she has spent a lot of time with the seminal figures of artificial intelligence including the founding fathers of AI from the 1956 Dartmouth summer workshop where the field was launched I reached out to Pamela for conversation in hopes of getting a sense what those early days were like and how their dreams continue to reverberate for the work of our community today I often don't know where the conversation may take us but I jump in and see having no constraints rules or goals is a wonderful way to discover new ideas this is the artificial intelligence podcast if you enjoy it subscribe on YouTube give it five stars and iTunes supported on patreon or simply connect with me on Twitter at lex friedman spelled fri d ma n and now here's my conversation with Pamela McCourt ik in 1979 yearbook machines who think was published in it you interview some of the early AI pioneers and explore the idea that they I was born not out of maybe math and computer science but out of myth and legend so tell me if you could the story of how you first arrived at the book the journey of beginning to write it I had been a novelist I'd published two novels and I was sitting under the portal at Stanford one day in 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 II don't write a novel write a history simple just go around you know interview them splice it together voila instant book hahaha it was much harder than that but nobody else was doing it and so I thought no this is a great opportunity and there were 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 I'm this is what I want to do I hope you'll cooperate and he said Oh mutter mutter well okay it's your your time it was the pitch for the I mean such a young field at that point how do you write a personal history of a field that's so young I said this is wonderful the founders of the field are alive and kicking and able to talk about what they're doing did they sound or feel like founders at the time that they know that they've been found they have founded some oh yeah they knew what they were doing was very important very what they what I now see in retrospect is that they were at the height of their research careers and it's humbling to me they took time out from all the things that they had to do as a consequence of being there and it's a talk to this woman who said I think I'm gonna write a book oh you know it was amazing just amazing so who stands out to you may be looking 63 years ago the Dartmouth conference the so Marvin Minsky was there McCarthy was there Claude Shannon Allen you'll herb Simon some of the folks you've mentioned right then there's the other characters right the would one of your co-authors yeah he wasn't at Dartmouth he was not Dharma no but I mean he was there I think it undergraduate then and and of course Joe draw I mean though all of these are players I'm not a Dartmouth them but in that era right it's seem you and so on so who are the characters if you could paint a picture that stand out to you or memory those people you've interviewed and maybe not people that were just in the India the atmosphere in the atmosphere uh of course the four founding fathers were extraordinary guys they really were who are the founding fathers Allen Newell Herbert Simon Marvin Minsky John McCarthy they were the four who were not only at the Dartmouth conference but Newland 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 and you mentioned Joe trout my husband I I was immersed in AI before I met Joe because I had been EDI Gonzalez assistant at Stanford and before that I had worked on a book by edited by Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman called a computers and thought it was the first textbook of readings of AI and they 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 him to this journal in 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 yeah what did I know and yet I was fascinated and that's why you saw that historical but that literary background which i think is very much a part of the continuum of AI that the AI grew out of that same impulse is that yeah that traditional what what was wood Ritu ai how did you even think of it back back then what what was the possibilities the dreams I was interesting to you 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 gonna succeed I in fact the final chapter is very wishy-washy frankly I'll succeed the fieldid yeah yes it was there the idea that a AI began with the wish to forge the God so the the spiritual component that we crave to create this other thing greater than ourselves for those guys I don't think so Newell and Simon were cognitive psychologists what they wanted was to simulate aspects of human intelligence and they found they could do it on the computer Minsky just thought it was a really cool thing to do likewise McCarthy McCarthy 'add got the idea in 1949 when when he was a Caltech student and he listened to somebody's lecture it's 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 Nuland Simon were very much cognitive psychology how can we simulate various things about cockney about human cognition what happened over the many years is of course our definition of intelligence expanded tremendously I mean these days biologists are comfortable talking about the intelligence of cell the intelligence of the brain they not just human brain but the intelligence of any kind of brain cephalopods I mean an octopus is really intelligent by any amount 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 behavioural primatologist Fran's Duvall say AI taught us the questions to ask yeah this is what happens right it's when you try to build it is when you start to actually ask questions if it puts a mirror to ourselves yeah right so you were there in the medical it seems like not many people were asking the questions that you were the trees tried trying to look at this field the way you were I was so low I when I went to get funding for this because I needed somebody to transcribe the interviews and I needed travel expenses I went to every thing 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 that was very interesting that's a very interesting idea but we'll think about it and the National Science Foundation actually said to be in plain English hey you're only a writer you're not at 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 felt and they still wouldn't budge I finally got a private grant without knowing who it was from IDI fredkin and MIT yeah he was a wealthy man and he liked what he called crackpot ideas and he considered this a crackpot is a crackpot idea and he was willing to support it I am ever grateful let me say that you know some would say that a history of science approach to AI or even just a history or anything like the book that you've written hasn't been written since by me I don't maybe I'm not familiar but it's certainly not many if we think about bigger than just these couple of decades few decades what what are the roots of AI oh they go back so far yes of course there's all the legendary stuff The Golem and the early robots of the 20th century but they go back much further than that if you read Homer Homer has robots in the Iliad and a 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 is ship gets from place one place to another he doesn't have two crew people to do that the crew man yeah it's it's magic it's robots whoa I thought how interesting so 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 and he 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 but if we actually reach back once again I think people don't actually really know that robots do appear an ideas of robots you talk about the Hellenic and the Bragg points of view oh yes can you tell me about each I defined it this way the Hellenic point of view is robots are great you know they are party help they help this guy have Festus does God have Festus in his Forge I presume he made them to help him and so on and so forth and and they they welcome the whole idea of robots the break 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 and a lot of the reaction to artificial intelligence has been a sense that this is this is somehow wicked this is somehow blasphemous we shouldn't be going there now you can say yeah but there gonna be some downsides and I say yes there are but blasphemy is not one of them you know there's a kind of fear that feels to be almost primal there's their religious roots to that because so much of our society has religious roots and so there is a feeling of like you said blasphemy though of creating the other of creating something you know it doesn't have to be artificial intelligence it's creating life in general mm-hmm it's the Frankenstein idea yes the annotator Frankenstein on my coffee table is this tremendous novel it really is just beautifully perceptive yes we we do fear this and we have good reason to fear it but because it can get out of hand maybe you can speak to that fear the psychology if you've thought about it you know there's a practical sort of fears concerns in the short term you can think of if we actually think about artificial intelligence systems you can think about bias of discrimination in algorithms so you you can think about their social networks have algorithms that recommend the content you see there by these algorithms control the behavior of the masses there are these concerns but it to me it feels like the fear that people have is deeper than that so have you thought about the psychology of it I think in a superficial way I have there is this notion that if we produce a machine that can think it will out thank us and therefore replace us I guess that's a that's a primal fear yes I almost look almost kind of a kind of mortality so around the time you said you work with it Stanford with Edie phagon bomb mm-hmm so let's look at that one person throughout this history clearly key person one of the many in the history of AI how has he changed in general around him how the Stanford changed in the last how many years I were talking about here no since that key 65 665 so I mean it does have to be about him I could be bigger but because usually key person an expert systems for example how is that how would these folks who've you've interviewed in the Samedi 79 changed through the decades in Ed's case I know 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 and ten years later he said no I see what you're getting at yes this is an impulse that has been this 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 just step back and think of the big picture it reminds me of when I was in Santa Fe I knew a lot of archaeologists and which was a hobby of mine and I 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 archeologist said to me they don't think that way you do know they're trying to match the shard to the to where it came from that's you know where did this corn the 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 the hard work and it is hard work that you don't step I can say oh well now let's talk about that you know the general meaning of all yes so none of the even Minsky and McCarthy they oh those guys did yeah the founding fathers did early on or pretty early on what they had but in a different way from how I looked at it the two cognitive psychologists Newell and Simon they wanted to imagine and reforming cognitive psychology so that we would really really understand the brain Minsky was more speculative and John McCarthy saw it as I think I'm doing 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 bla bla bla bla 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 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 gonna 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 in the classics are you are is certainly the machines trying to overthrow of the humans Frankenstein is different Frankenstein is a creature you never 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 so who's the villain in Frankenstein it's unclear right oh it is unclear yeah it's really the people who drive him but driving him away right they bring out the worst that's right they gave him no human solace and he is driven away you're right he becomes at one point a friend of a blind man and they he serves this blind man and they become great very friendly but it when the sighted people of the blind man's family come it ah you've got a monster here so it's 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 know you are making monsters of these people because you won't give them the respect and love that they deserve do you have if we get philosophical for a second do you worry that once we create machines that are a little bit more intelligent let's look at Roomba that vacuum is the cleaner that that this darker part of human nature where we abuse the other the the somebody who's different will come out 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 that yeah people will be won over so you have looked deep into these people have deep conversations and it's yeah interesting to get a sense of stories of the way they were thinking the way it was changed your own thinking about AI has changed see master McCarthy is uh what about the years at CMU Carnegie Mellon with Joe and was sure a Joe was not in AI he was in algorithmic complexity was there always a line between AI and computer science for example is AI its own place of outcasts it was at the feeling there was a kind of outcasts period for AI for instance in 1974 the new field was hardly ten years old the new field of computer science was asked by the net National Science Foundation I believe but it may have been the National Academies I can't remember to you know tell us tell our 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 really Don Don Knuth yes I talked to mrs. Nisa out of all the people yes but you see yeah an AI person couldn't have made that argument he wouldn't have been believed but Knuth was believed yes so George I worked on the real stuff a Joe was working on algorithmic complexity but he would say in plain English again and again the smartest people I know are in AI really 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 her almost always would like a sherry so he'd stop in and we talked for an hour two hours my journal says we talked this afternoon for three hours what was in his mind at the time if in terms of an AI side of things oh we didn't talk too much about AI we talked about other things life we both loved literature and herb had read Proust in the original French twice all the way through I can't I'm read 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 cuz he was he was actually enough of a painter that he had to give it up because he was afraid it was interfering with his research and so on so no it was really just Chat Chat but it was very warm so one summer I said to her you know well 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 you know 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 you could do something about that dot I 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 sure a small talk it was really for some topic of 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 right and we I decided I would organize it and there would be eight of us Alan Noll and his wife herb Simon and his wife Dorothea there was a novelist in town a man named Mark Harris he had just just arrived and his wife Josephine mark was most famous then for a novel called bang the drum solo slowly which was about baseball and Joe and me so eight people and we met monthly and we we just sank our teeth into really hard topics and it was great fun how have your own views around artificial intelligence changed in through the process of writing machines who think and afterwards the ripple effects I was a little skeptical that this whole thing would work out it didn't matter to me it was so audacious the whole thing being a IAI general yeah and in some ways it hasn't worked out the way I expected so far that is to say there's this wonderful lot of apps thanks to deep learning and so on but those are algorithmic yeah and in the part of symbolic processing there is very little yet yes and that's the feel that lies waiting for industrious and industrious graduate students maybe you can tell me some figures they popped up in your life in the 80s with expert systems where there was the symbolic AI possibilities of what's you know that what most people think of as AI if you dream of the possibilities AI is really expert system and those hit a few walls and those challenges there and I think yes they will reemerge again with some new breakthroughs and so on but what did that feel like both the possibility and the winter that followed slow down ah you know this whole thing about AI winter is to me a crock snow winters 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 yeah you know research scientific research goes in fits and starts it isn't this nice smooth Oh this follows this follows this no oh you know it just doesn't work that way there's an interesting thing the way winters happen it's never the fault of the researchers it's the it's the the some source of hype over promising well no let me take that back sometimes it is the fault of the researchers sometimes certain researchers might over-promised the possibilities they themselves believe that we're just a few years away sort of just recently talked to you on musk and he believes he'll have an autonomous Veeck will have autonomous vehicles in a year I and he believes it a year a year yeah would have mass deployment one time for the record this is too fast on 19 right now yes he's talking 2020 to do the impossible you really have to believe it and I think what's going to happen when you believe it cuz there's a lot of really brilliant people around him is some good stuff will come out of it some unexpected brilliant breakthroughs will come out of it when you really believe it when you work that hard I believe that I believe autonomous vehicles will come I just don't believe that it'll be in a year yeah I wish but nevertheless there's I found vehicles is a good example there's a feeling many companies have promised by 2021 by 2022 for GM I basically every single automotive companies promise they'll have autonomous vehicles so that kind of over the promise is what leads to the winter because it will come to those dates there won't be autonomous vehicles and they'll be a feeling well wait a minute if we took your word at that time that means we just spent billions of dollars had made no money and there's a counter response to where everybody gives up on it sort of intellectually and at every level the hope just dies and all that's left is a few basic researchers so you're uncomfortable with some aspects of this this idea well it's the difference between science and commerce so you think science prevail science goes on the way does oh it was science can really be killed by not getting proper funding or timely funding I think Great Britain was a perfect example of that the Whitehill report in remembers a year essentially said there's no use of great britain putting that any money into this it's it's going nowhere and this was all about social factions in Great Britain ed Murrow hated Cambridge and Cambridge hated Manchester and yep somebody else can write that story but it really did have a heart effect on research there now they've come roaring back with deep mind yeah but that's one guy and his visionaries around him but just to push on that it's kind of interesting you have this dislike of the idea of an AI winter the words that where's that coming from where were you oh because I just don't think it's true uh there was a particular periods of time this romantic notion certainly yeah no I I admire science perhaps more than I admire commerce Commerce is fine hey you know we all got to live but science has a much longer view than Commerce and continues almost regardless not it can't continue totally regardless but it almost regardless of what saleable and what's not what's monetizable and what's not so the winter is just something that happens on the Commerce side and the science so it seemed arches that's a beautifully optimistic inspiring message I agree with you I think if we look at the key people that work in AI their work in key scientists most disciplines they continue working out of the love for science no matter the you can always scrape up some funding to stay alive and they continue working diligently but there certainly is a huge amount of funding now and there's a concern on the AI side and deep learning there's a concern that we might with over-promising hit another slowdown and funding which does affect the number of students you know that kind of thing yeah it no it does so the kind of ideas you had two machines who think did you continue that curiosity throw through the decades that followed yes I did and what what was your view historical view of how AI community evolved the conversations about it the work as it persisted the same way from its birth no of course not like it's just as we were just talking the symbolic AI 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'd gotten involved with complexity of the Santa Fe Institute I thought algorithms yeah you there in the surface 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 bigger trees the shortsightedness and so on and so on so you mentioned santa fe institute i usually you've written the novel edge of chaos but it's inspired by the ideas of complexity where a lot of which have been extensively explored at the Santa Fe Institute right it's a I mean it's another fascinating topic just sort of emergent complexity from chaos nobody knows how it happens really it seems to where all the interesting stuff happened so how the first knotty novel but just complexity in general in the work of Santa Fe fit into the bigger puzzle of the history of AI or maybe even your personal journey through that 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 and what his project Aaron which was a lifelong project did was reflect his own cognitive processes okay Harold and I even though I wrote a book about it we had a lot of friction between us and I went I thought this is it you know the book died it was published didn't fell 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 in two months at Caltech and then the spring semester in Munich Germany okay those two months at the Santa Fe Institute were so restorative for me and I began to it this 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 Stewart Coffman or you know any number of people and 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 Gelman and I told Murray what Harold Cohen had done and I said you know this sounds to me like a complex adaptive system he said yeah it is well what do you know Harold's Erin had all these kissing 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 Erin was doing okay so I got really interested in what was going on at the Institute and that 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 and I thought about it and I I had my eye on some other project god knows what and I said I'm sorry George yeah I really love to do it but you know just not gonna work for me at this moment I said all 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 that was a road not taken' that I wish I'd taken well you know or this just on that on that point it's quite brave for you as an as a writer as a sort of coming from a world of literature and the literary thinking historical thing I mean just from that world and bravely talking to quite I assume large egos and in fact in uh AI or in complexity and so on how did you do it like where did you I mean I suppose they could be intimidated of you as well this is two different worlds I I never picked up that anybody was intimidated by me how are you brave enough where did you find the guts it's not just dumb dumb luck I mean I this is an interesting Rock to turn over I'm gonna write a book about and you know people have enough patience with writers if they think they're gonna end up at a book that they let you flail around and so on as well but they also look if the writer has there's like if there's a sparkle in their eye if they get it yeah sure right when were you at the Santa Fe Institute uh the time I'm talking about is 1990 yeah 1990 1901 92 but we then because Joe is an external faculty member we're 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 they again the audacity of the ideas that really appeals to me I think that there there's this feeling much like in great great Institutes of neuroscience for example that it's there they're in it for the long game of understanding something fundamental about reality in nature and that's really exciting so if we start to not to look a little bit more recently how you know AI is really popular today how is this world you mentioned the algorithmic but in general is the spirit of the people the kind of conversations you hear through the grapevine and so on is that different than the roots that you remember no the same kind of excitement the same kind of this is really gonna make a difference in the world and it will it has you know a lot of folks especially young you know 20 years old or something they think we've just found something special here we're going to change the world tomorrow on a timescale do you have a sense of what of the time scale at which breakthroughs in AI haven't I really don't because look at deep learning if that was a Geoffrey Hinton came up with the algorithm in 86 but it took all these years for the technology to be good enough to actually be be applicable so no I can't predict that at all I can't I wouldn't even try well let me ask you to not to try to predict but to speak to the you know I'm sure in the 60s as it continues now there's people that think let's call it we can call it this fun word the singularity mmm when there is a phase shift there's some profound feeling where we're all really surprised by what's able to be achieved I'm sure those dreams were there I remember reading quotes in the 60s and those 15 you how have your own views maybe if you look back about the timeline of a singularity changed well I'm not a big fan of the singularity as Ray Kurzweil has presented it how would you define the Ray Kurzweil sort of a holiday well how do you think of singularity in the skin if I understand Kurt's Wiles view it's sort of there's going to be this moment when machines are smarter than humans and you know game game over however the game over is I mean do they put us on a reservation do they etc etc and first of all machines are smarter than humans in some ways all over the place and they have been since adding machines were invented so it's not it's not gonna come like some great eatable crossroads you know where they meet each other and our offspring Oedipus says your dad yeah it's just not gonna happen yes oh it's already game over with calculators right they're already out to do much better basic arithmetic than us but you know there's a human-like intelligence and it's not the ones that destroy us but you know somebody that you can have as a as a friend oh you can have deep connections with that kind of passing the Turing test and beyond those kinds of ideas have you dreamt of those oh yes yes yeah it was possible in a book I wrote with that Feigenbaum there's a little story called the geriatric robot and how I came up with the geriatric robot is a story in itself but here's here's what the Gerry robot does it doesn't just clean you up and feed you and we'll you out into the Sun it's great advantages it listens it says tell me again about the great coup of 73 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 oh yeah I mean for me that deeply excites me so I think there's a lot of us like she got a no 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 come on get over it don't you think that's a good thing for the world that AI could potentially walk I do absolutely and furthermore I want you know I'm pushing 80 now by the time I need help like that I also want it to roll itself in a corner and shut the  up let me let me linger on that point do you really though yeah I do here's what you wanted to push back a little bit a little but I have watched my friends go through the whole issue around having help in the house and some of them have been very lucky and they had fabulous help and some of them have had people in the house who want to keep the television going on all day Oh so want to talk on their phones all day No so basically just yourself in the corner unfortunately as humans when were assistants we we care we're still even when we're assisting others we care about ourselves more of course and so you create more frustration and in robot AI assistant can really optimize the experience of you I was just speaking to the point you actually bring up a very very good point but I was speaking to the fact that as humans they're a little complicated that we don't necessarily want a perfect servant I don't maybe you disagree with that but there's um I think there's a push and pull with humans mm-hmm a little tension a little mystery that of course that's really difficult failure to get right but I do sense especially in today with social media the people are getting more and more lonely even young folks and sometimes especially young folks that loneliness there's a longing for connection and AI can help alleviate some of that loneliness some just somebody who listens like in person that so we speak sodus so so so to speak yeah so to speak yeah that to me is really exciting but so if we look at that that level of intelligence is exceptionally difficult to achieve actually as the singularity or whatever that's the human level bar that people have dreamt of that to touring dreamt of it he had a date time line do you have how of your own timeline evolved on past don't I don't even think about it you don't even know just this field has been so full of surprises for me you just take him in and see yeah it's I just can't maybe that's because I've been around the field long enough to think you know don't don't go that way herps was terrible about making these predictions of when this and that would happen and he was a sensible guy yeah his quotes are often used right as a legend yeah yeah do you have concerns about AI the existential threats that many people like um Oscars and some Harris and others oh yeah yeah that takes up a half a chapter in my book I called it the male gaze well you hang out the male gaze is actually a term from film criticism and I'm blocking on the woman's who dreamed this up but she pointed out how most movies were made from the male point of view that women were objects not subjects they didn't have any agency and so on and so forth so when Elon and his pals Hawking and so on came hey I was gonna eat our lunch our dinner and our midnight snack - I thought what and I said to Ed Val oh this is the first gun 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 and laughed he said I didn't think about it that way but I did I did and it is the male gaze you know 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 a sense of empathy or are they just gonna be uh uh I know we've had centuries of guys like that that's interesting that the the ego the male gaze is immediately threatened and so you can't think in a patient calm way of how the tech could have all and he's speaking of which here and then b6 book the future of women no I think at the time and now certainly now I mean I'm sorry maybe at the time but I'm more cognitive now is extremely relevant you and Nancy Ramsay talk about four possible futures right of women in science and tech so if we look at the decades before and after the book was released can you tell a history sorry of women in science and tech you know how it has evolved how have things changed where do we stand not enough they have not changed enough the way that women are ground down in computing is simply unbelievable but what are the four possible futures for women in tech from the book what you're really looking at our 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 as a golden age of equality was the hardest chapter to write and I used something from the Santa Fe Institute which is the sand pile 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 and in 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 sand pile effect and that made me feel good it didn't change all of society but it really woke a lot of people up but I you in general optimistic about maybe after me - I mean me choose about a very specific kind of thing boy solve that and you solve everything but are you in general optimistic about the future yes I'm a congenital optimist I can't help it what about AI what are your thoughts I went one way I of course I get asked what you worry about and the one thing I worry about is the things that we can't anticipate you know there's going to be something out of left field that what we will just say we weren't prepared for that I am generally optimistic when I first took up being interested in AI like most people in the field more intelligence was like more virtue you know what could be bad and in a way I still believe that but I realized that my notion of intelligence has broadened there are many kinds of intelligence and we need to imbue our machines with those many kinds see you've now just finished or in the process of finishing your the book you've been working on a memoir what how have you changed I know it's just writing but how have you changed the process if you look back what kind of stuff did it bring up to you that surprised you looking at the entirety of it all the biggest thing and it really wasn't a surprise is how lucky I was oh my to be it to have access to the beginning of a scientific field that is going to change the world how did I luck out and yes of course my my view of things has widened a lot 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 male 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 having a glass of wine maybe two and he said what drew you to AI and I said well 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 brilliant actually so AI really humbles all of us and humbles the people that need to be humbled the most wow that is so beautiful Pamela thank you so much for talking it was really a pleasure thank you you