WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:04.640 The following is a conversation with Pamela McCordick. She's an author who has written 00:04.640 --> 00:08.400 on the history and the philosophical significance of artificial intelligence. 00:09.040 --> 00:17.440 Her books include Machines Who Think in 1979, The Fifth Generation in 1983, with Ed Fangenbaum, 00:17.440 --> 00:22.960 who's considered to be the father of expert systems, The Edge of Chaos, The Features of Women, 00:22.960 --> 00:28.960 and many more books. I came across her work in an unusual way by stumbling in a quote from 00:28.960 --> 00:35.280 Machines Who Think that is something like, artificial intelligence began with the ancient 00:35.280 --> 00:41.920 wish to forge the gods. That was a beautiful way to draw a connecting line between our societal 00:41.920 --> 00:48.720 relationship with AI from the grounded day to day science, math, and engineering to popular stories 00:48.720 --> 00:55.520 and science fiction and myths of automatons that go back for centuries. Through her literary work, 00:55.520 --> 01:00.400 she has spent a lot of time with the seminal figures of artificial intelligence, 01:00.400 --> 01:07.760 including the founding fathers of AI from the 1956 Dartmouth summer workshop where the field 01:07.760 --> 01:13.600 was launched. I reached out to Pamela for a conversation in hopes of getting a sense of 01:13.600 --> 01:18.400 what those early days were like and how their dreams continued to reverberate 01:18.400 --> 01:23.840 through the work of our community today. I often don't know where the conversation may take us, 01:23.840 --> 01:29.600 but I jump in and see. Having no constraints, rules, or goals is a wonderful way to discover new 01:29.600 --> 01:36.320 ideas. This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, 01:36.320 --> 01:41.600 give it five stars on iTunes, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter 01:41.600 --> 01:49.680 at Lex Freedman, spelled F R I D M A N. And now here's my conversation with Pamela McCordick. 01:49.680 --> 01:58.640 In 1979, your book, Machines Who Think, was published. In it, you interview some of the early 01:58.640 --> 02:06.320 AI pioneers and explore the idea that AI was born not out of maybe math and computer science, 02:06.320 --> 02:14.960 but out of myth and legend. So tell me if you could the story of how you first arrived at the 02:14.960 --> 02:22.400 book, the journey of beginning to write it. I had been a novelist. I'd published two novels. 02:23.120 --> 02:31.760 And I was sitting under the portal at Stanford one day in the house we were renting for the 02:31.760 --> 02:37.760 summer. And I thought, I should write a novel about these weird people in AI, I know. And then I 02:37.760 --> 02:44.240 thought, ah, don't write a novel, write a history. Simple. Just go around, you know, interview them, 02:44.240 --> 02:50.400 splice it together. Voila, instant book. Ha, ha, ha. It was much harder than that. 02:50.400 --> 02:58.320 But nobody else was doing it. And so I thought, well, this is a great opportunity. And there were 02:59.760 --> 03:06.240 people who, John McCarthy, for example, thought it was a nutty idea. There were much, you know, 03:06.240 --> 03:11.920 the field had not evolved yet, so on. And he had some mathematical thing he thought I should write 03:11.920 --> 03:18.480 instead. And I said, no, John, I am not a woman in search of a project. I'm, this is what I want 03:18.480 --> 03:24.000 to do. I hope you'll cooperate. And he said, oh, mother, mother, well, okay, it's your, your time. 03:24.960 --> 03:31.280 What was the pitch for the, I mean, such a young field at that point. How do you write 03:31.280 --> 03:37.520 a personal history of a field that's so young? I said, this is wonderful. The founders of the 03:37.520 --> 03:43.120 field are alive and kicking and able to talk about what they're doing. Did they sound or feel like 03:43.120 --> 03:48.560 founders at the time? Did they know that they've been found, that they've founded something? Oh, 03:48.560 --> 03:55.120 yeah, they knew what they were doing was very important, very. What they, what I now see in 03:55.120 --> 04:04.080 retrospect is that they were at the height of their research careers. And it's humbling to me 04:04.080 --> 04:09.280 that they took time out from all the things that they had to do as a consequence of being there. 04:10.320 --> 04:14.560 And to talk to this woman who said, I think I'm going to write a book about you. 04:14.560 --> 04:23.840 No, it was amazing, just amazing. So who, who stands out to you? Maybe looking 63 years ago, 04:23.840 --> 04:31.040 the Dartmouth conference. So Marvin Minsky was there. McCarthy was there. Claude Shannon, 04:31.040 --> 04:36.960 Alan Newell, Herb Simon, some of the folks you've mentioned. Right. Then there's other characters, 04:36.960 --> 04:44.720 right? One of your coauthors. He wasn't at Dartmouth. He wasn't at Dartmouth, but I mean. 04:44.720 --> 04:50.880 He was a, I think an undergraduate then. And, and of course, Joe Traub. I mean, 04:50.880 --> 04:58.720 all of these are players, not at Dartmouth them, but in that era. Right. It's same you and so on. 04:58.720 --> 05:03.680 So who are the characters, if you could paint a picture that stand out to you from memory, 05:03.680 --> 05:07.200 those people you've interviewed and maybe not people that were just in the, 05:08.400 --> 05:13.760 in the, the atmosphere, in the atmosphere. Of course, the four founding fathers were 05:13.760 --> 05:17.040 extraordinary guys. They really were. Who are the founding fathers? 05:18.560 --> 05:22.480 Alan Newell, Herbert Simon, Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, 05:22.480 --> 05:26.240 they were the four who were not only at the Dartmouth conference, 05:26.240 --> 05:31.200 but Newell and Simon arrived there with a working program called the logic theorist. 05:31.200 --> 05:38.400 Everybody else had great ideas about how they might do it, but they weren't going to do it yet. 05:41.040 --> 05:48.720 And you mentioned Joe Traub, my husband. I was immersed in AI before I met Joe, 05:50.080 --> 05:54.960 because I had been Ed Feigenbaum's assistant at Stanford. And before that, 05:54.960 --> 06:01.520 I had worked on a book by edited by Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman called 06:02.800 --> 06:09.200 Computers and Thought. It was the first textbook of readings of AI. And they, they only did it 06:09.200 --> 06:13.120 because they were trying to teach AI to people at Berkeley. And there was nothing, you know, 06:13.120 --> 06:17.600 you'd have to send them to this journal and that journal. This was not the internet where you could 06:17.600 --> 06:26.080 go look at an article. So I was fascinated from the get go by AI. I was an English major, you know, 06:26.080 --> 06:33.200 what did I know? And yet I was fascinated. And that's why you saw that historical, 06:33.200 --> 06:40.320 that literary background, which I think is very much a part of the continuum of AI that 06:40.320 --> 06:48.000 the AI grew out of that same impulse. Was that, yeah, that traditional? What, what was, what drew 06:48.000 --> 06:54.800 you to AI? How did you even think of it back, back then? What, what was the possibilities, 06:54.800 --> 07:03.200 the dreams? What was interesting to you? The idea of intelligence outside the human cranium, 07:03.200 --> 07:08.000 this was a phenomenal idea. And even when I finished machines who think, 07:08.000 --> 07:15.040 I didn't know if they were going to succeed. In fact, the final chapter is very wishy washy, 07:15.040 --> 07:25.200 frankly. I don't succeed the field did. Yeah. Yeah. So was there the idea that AI began with 07:25.200 --> 07:32.000 the wish to forge the God? So the spiritual component that we crave to create this other 07:32.000 --> 07:40.880 thing greater than ourselves? For those guys, I don't think so. Newell and Simon were cognitive 07:40.880 --> 07:49.840 psychologists. What they wanted was to simulate aspects of human intelligence. And they found 07:49.840 --> 07:57.600 they could do it on the computer. Minsky just thought it was a really cool thing to do. 07:57.600 --> 08:07.120 Likewise, McCarthy. McCarthy had got the idea in 1949 when, when he was a Caltech student. And 08:08.560 --> 08:15.520 he listened to somebody's lecture. It's in my book, I forget who it was. And he thought, 08:15.520 --> 08:20.480 oh, that would be fun to do. How do we do that? And he took a very mathematical approach. 08:20.480 --> 08:28.800 Minsky was hybrid. And Newell and Simon were very much cognitive psychology. How can we 08:28.800 --> 08:37.280 simulate various things about human cognition? What happened over the many years is, of course, 08:37.280 --> 08:42.480 our definition of intelligence expanded tremendously. I mean, these days, 08:43.920 --> 08:48.960 biologists are comfortable talking about the intelligence of cell, the intelligence of the 08:48.960 --> 08:57.840 brain, not just human brain, but the intelligence of any kind of brain, cephalopause. I mean, 08:59.520 --> 09:05.840 an octopus is really intelligent by any, we wouldn't have thought of that in the 60s, 09:05.840 --> 09:12.560 even the 70s. So all these things have worked in. And I did hear one behavioral 09:12.560 --> 09:20.640 primatologist, Franz Duval, say AI taught us the questions to ask. 09:22.800 --> 09:27.760 Yeah, this is what happens, right? It's when you try to build it, is when you start to actually 09:27.760 --> 09:35.360 ask questions, if it puts a mirror to ourselves. So you were there in the middle of it. It seems 09:35.360 --> 09:41.920 like not many people were asking the questions that you were trying to look at this field, 09:41.920 --> 09:48.480 the way you were. I was solo. When I went to get funding for this, because I needed somebody to 09:48.480 --> 09:59.840 transcribe the interviews and I needed travel expenses, I went to every thing you could think of, 09:59.840 --> 10:11.280 the NSF, the DARPA. There was an Air Force place that doled out money. And each of them said, 10:11.840 --> 10:18.640 well, that was very interesting. That's a very interesting idea. But we'll think about it. 10:19.200 --> 10:24.320 And the National Science Foundation actually said to me in plain English, 10:24.320 --> 10:30.960 hey, you're only a writer. You're not an historian of science. And I said, yeah, that's true. But 10:30.960 --> 10:35.360 the historians of science will be crawling all over this field. I'm writing for the general 10:35.360 --> 10:44.000 audience. So I thought, and they still wouldn't budge. I finally got a private grant without 10:44.000 --> 10:51.440 knowing who it was from from Ed Fredkin at MIT. He was a wealthy man, and he liked what he called 10:51.440 --> 10:56.880 crackpot ideas. And he considered this a crackpot idea. This a crackpot idea. And he was willing to 10:56.880 --> 11:04.240 support it. I am ever grateful. Let me say that. You know, some would say that a history of science 11:04.240 --> 11:09.360 approach to AI, or even just a history or anything like the book that you've written, 11:09.360 --> 11:16.640 hasn't been written since. Maybe I'm not familiar. But it's certainly not many. 11:16.640 --> 11:24.000 If we think about bigger than just these couple of decades, a few decades, what are the roots 11:25.120 --> 11:32.160 of AI? Oh, they go back so far. Yes, of course, there's all the legendary stuff, the 11:32.800 --> 11:42.160 Golem and the early robots of the 20th century. But they go back much further than that. If 11:42.160 --> 11:50.320 you read Homer, Homer has robots in the Iliad. And a classical scholar was pointing out to me 11:50.320 --> 11:55.440 just a few months ago. Well, you said you just read the Odyssey. The Odyssey is full of robots. 11:55.440 --> 12:01.520 It is, I said. Yeah, how do you think Odysseus's ship gets from place one place to another? He 12:01.520 --> 12:09.040 doesn't have the crew people to do that, the crew men. Yeah, it's magic. It's robots. Oh, I thought. 12:09.040 --> 12:17.680 How interesting. So we've had this notion of AI for a long time. And then toward the end of the 12:17.680 --> 12:24.000 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century, there were scientists who actually tried to 12:24.000 --> 12:29.280 make this happen some way or another, not successfully, they didn't have the technology 12:29.280 --> 12:40.160 for it. And of course, Babbage, in the 1850s and 60s, he saw that what he was building was capable 12:40.160 --> 12:47.040 of intelligent behavior. And he, when he ran out of funding, the British government finally said, 12:47.040 --> 12:53.360 that's enough. He and Lady Lovelace decided, oh, well, why don't we make, you know, why don't we 12:53.360 --> 13:00.560 play the ponies with this? He had other ideas for raising money too. But if we actually reach back 13:00.560 --> 13:07.280 once again, I think people don't actually really know that robots do appear or ideas of robots. 13:07.280 --> 13:14.240 You talk about the Hellenic and the Hebraic points of view. Oh, yes. Can you tell me about each? 13:15.040 --> 13:22.480 I defined it this way, the Hellenic point of view is robots are great. You know, they're party help, 13:22.480 --> 13:30.320 they help this guy, Hephaestus, this God Hephaestus in his forge. I presume he made them to help him, 13:31.200 --> 13:38.560 and so on and so forth. And they welcome the whole idea of robots. The Hebraic view has to do with, 13:39.360 --> 13:46.800 I think it's the second commandment, thou shalt not make any graven image. In other words, you 13:46.800 --> 13:54.480 better not start imitating humans, because that's just forbidden. It's the second commandment. 13:55.520 --> 14:05.840 And a lot of the reaction to artificial intelligence has been a sense that this is 14:05.840 --> 14:16.800 this is somehow wicked. This is somehow blasphemous. We shouldn't be going there. Now, you can say, 14:16.800 --> 14:21.600 yeah, but there're going to be some downsides. And I say, yes, there are. But blasphemy is not one of 14:21.600 --> 14:29.520 them. You know, there's a kind of fear that feels to be almost primal. Is there religious roots to 14:29.520 --> 14:36.160 that? Because so much of our society has religious roots. And so there is a feeling of, like you 14:36.160 --> 14:44.080 said, blasphemy of creating the other, of creating something, you know, it doesn't have to be artificial 14:44.080 --> 14:50.480 intelligence. It's creating life in general. It's the Frankenstein idea. There's the annotated 14:50.480 --> 14:58.080 Frankenstein on my coffee table. It's a tremendous novel. It really is just beautifully perceptive. 14:58.080 --> 15:06.800 Yes, we do fear this and we have good reason to fear it, but because it can get out of hand. 15:06.800 --> 15:11.360 Maybe you can speak to that fear, the psychology, if you thought about it, you know, 15:11.360 --> 15:16.160 there's a practical set of fears, concerns in the short term, you can think of, if we actually 15:16.160 --> 15:22.720 think about artificial intelligence systems, you can think about bias of discrimination in 15:22.720 --> 15:32.160 algorithms or you can think about their social networks, have algorithms that recommend the 15:32.160 --> 15:37.680 content you see, thereby these algorithms control the behavior of the masses. There's these concerns. 15:38.240 --> 15:45.040 But to me, it feels like the fear that people have is deeper than that. So have you thought about 15:45.040 --> 15:53.440 the psychology of it? I think in a superficial way I have. There is this notion that if we 15:55.680 --> 16:01.200 produce a machine that can think, it will outthink us and therefore replace us. 16:02.000 --> 16:11.840 I guess that's a primal fear of almost kind of a kind of mortality. So around the time you said 16:11.840 --> 16:21.920 you worked with Ed Stamford with Ed Faganbaum. So let's look at that one person throughout his 16:21.920 --> 16:31.600 history, clearly a key person, one of the many in the history of AI. How has he changed in general 16:31.600 --> 16:36.480 around him? How has Stamford changed in the last, how many years are we talking about here? 16:36.480 --> 16:44.720 Oh, since 65. So maybe it doesn't have to be about him. It could be bigger, but because he was a 16:44.720 --> 16:51.360 key person in expert systems, for example, how are these folks who you've interviewed 16:53.040 --> 16:58.400 in the 70s, 79, changed through the decades? 16:58.400 --> 17:10.720 In Ed's case, I know him well. We are dear friends. We see each other every month or so. 17:11.520 --> 17:16.160 He told me that when machines who think first came out, he really thought all the front 17:16.160 --> 17:26.000 matter was kind of baloney. And 10 years later, he said, no, I see what you're getting at. Yes, 17:26.000 --> 17:31.520 this is an impulse that has been, this has been a human impulse for thousands of years 17:32.160 --> 17:36.640 to create something outside the human cranium that has intelligence. 17:41.120 --> 17:47.520 I think it's very hard when you're down at the algorithmic level, and you're just trying to 17:47.520 --> 17:53.840 make something work, which is hard enough to step back and think of the big picture. 17:53.840 --> 18:02.000 It reminds me of when I was in Santa Fe, I knew a lot of archaeologists, which was a hobby of mine, 18:02.800 --> 18:08.000 and I would say, yeah, yeah, well, you can look at the shards and say, oh, 18:08.000 --> 18:14.160 this came from this tribe and this came from this trade route and so on. But what about the big 18:14.160 --> 18:21.600 picture? And a very distinguished archaeologist said to me, they don't think that way. You do 18:21.600 --> 18:27.920 know they're trying to match the shard to the to where it came from. That's, you know, where did 18:27.920 --> 18:34.480 this corn, the remainder of this corn come from? Was it grown here? Was it grown elsewhere? And I 18:34.480 --> 18:44.560 think this is part of the AI, any scientific field. You're so busy doing the hard work. And it is 18:44.560 --> 18:49.920 hard work that you don't step back and say, oh, well, now let's talk about the, you know, 18:49.920 --> 18:56.720 the general meaning of all this. Yes. So none of the, even Minsky and McCarthy, 18:58.080 --> 19:04.880 they, oh, those guys did. Yeah. The founding fathers did early on or pretty early on. Well, 19:04.880 --> 19:11.200 they had, but in a different way from how I looked at it, the two cognitive psychologists, 19:11.200 --> 19:20.960 Newell and Simon, they wanted to imagine reforming cognitive psychology so that we would really, 19:20.960 --> 19:31.520 really understand the brain. Yeah. Minsky was more speculative. And John McCarthy saw it as, 19:32.960 --> 19:40.080 I think I'm doing, doing him right by this. He really saw it as a great boon for human beings to 19:40.080 --> 19:49.440 have this technology. And that was reason enough to do it. And he had wonderful, wonderful fables 19:50.240 --> 19:57.920 about how if you do the mathematics, you will see that these things are really good for human beings. 19:57.920 --> 20:05.280 And if you had a technological objection, he had an answer, a technological answer. But here's how 20:05.280 --> 20:10.480 we could get over that. And then blah, blah, blah, blah. And one of his favorite things was 20:10.480 --> 20:15.680 what he called the literary problem, which of course, he presented to me several times. 20:16.400 --> 20:23.680 That is, everything in literature, there are conventions in literature. One of the conventions 20:23.680 --> 20:37.040 is that you have a villain and a hero. And the hero in most literature is human. And the villain 20:37.040 --> 20:42.000 in most literature is a machine. And he said, no, that's just not the way it's going to be. 20:42.560 --> 20:48.000 But that's the way we're used to it. So when we tell stories about AI, it's always with this 20:48.000 --> 20:57.760 paradigm. I thought, yeah, he's right. Looking back, the classics, RUR is certainly the machines 20:57.760 --> 21:07.040 trying to overthrow the humans. Frankenstein is different. Frankenstein is a creature. 21:08.480 --> 21:14.560 He never has a name. Frankenstein, of course, is the guy who created him, the human Dr. Frankenstein. 21:14.560 --> 21:23.120 And this creature wants to be loved, wants to be accepted. And it is only when Frankenstein 21:24.720 --> 21:32.720 turns his head, in fact, runs the other way. And the creature is without love 21:34.400 --> 21:38.560 that he becomes the monster that he later becomes. 21:39.680 --> 21:43.840 So who's the villain in Frankenstein? It's unclear, right? 21:43.840 --> 21:45.520 Oh, it is unclear. Yeah. 21:45.520 --> 21:54.320 It's really the people who drive him, by driving him away, they bring out the worst. 21:54.320 --> 22:00.800 That's right. They give him no human solace. And he is driven away, you're right. 22:03.040 --> 22:10.160 He becomes, at one point, the friend of a blind man. And he serves this blind man, 22:10.160 --> 22:16.640 and they become very friendly. But when the sighted people of the blind man's family come in, 22:18.640 --> 22:26.000 you got a monster here. So it's very didactic in its way. And what I didn't know is that Mary Shelley 22:26.000 --> 22:33.440 and Percy Shelley were great readers of the literature surrounding abolition in the United 22:33.440 --> 22:41.200 States, the abolition of slavery. And they picked that up wholesale. You are making monsters of 22:41.200 --> 22:45.680 these people because you won't give them the respect and love that they deserve. 22:46.800 --> 22:54.880 Do you have, if we get philosophical for a second, do you worry that once we create 22:54.880 --> 22:59.840 machines that are a little bit more intelligent? Let's look at Roomba, the vacuum cleaner, 22:59.840 --> 23:05.360 that this darker part of human nature where we abuse 23:07.760 --> 23:12.400 the other, somebody who's different, will come out? 23:13.520 --> 23:22.640 I don't worry about it. I could imagine it happening. But I think that what AI has to offer 23:22.640 --> 23:32.480 the human race will be so attractive that people will be won over. So you have looked deep into 23:32.480 --> 23:40.080 these people, had deep conversations, and it's interesting to get a sense of stories of the 23:40.080 --> 23:44.480 way they were thinking and the way it was changed, the way your own thinking about AI has changed. 23:44.480 --> 23:53.360 As you mentioned, McCarthy, what about the years at CMU, Carnegie Mellon, with Joe? 23:53.360 --> 24:02.800 Sure. Joe was not in AI. He was in algorithmic complexity. 24:03.440 --> 24:09.040 Was there always a line between AI and computer science, for example? Is AI its own place of 24:09.040 --> 24:15.920 outcasts? Was that the feeling? There was a kind of outcast period for AI. 24:15.920 --> 24:28.720 For instance, in 1974, the new field was hardly 10 years old. The new field of computer science 24:28.720 --> 24:33.200 was asked by the National Science Foundation, I believe, but it may have been the National 24:33.200 --> 24:42.720 Academies, I can't remember, to tell our fellow scientists where computer science is and what 24:42.720 --> 24:52.880 it means. And they wanted to leave out AI. And they only agreed to put it in because Don Knuth 24:52.880 --> 24:59.760 said, hey, this is important. You can't just leave that out. Really? Don? Don Knuth, yes. 24:59.760 --> 25:06.480 I talked to Mr. Nietzsche. Out of all the people. Yes. But you see, an AI person couldn't have made 25:06.480 --> 25:10.880 that argument. He wouldn't have been believed, but Knuth was believed. Yes. 25:10.880 --> 25:18.160 So Joe Trout worked on the real stuff. Joe was working on algorithmic complexity, 25:18.160 --> 25:24.800 but he would say in plain English again and again, the smartest people I know are in AI. 25:24.800 --> 25:32.320 Really? Oh, yes. No question. Anyway, Joe loved these guys. What happened was that 25:34.080 --> 25:40.160 I guess it was as I started to write machines who think, Herb Simon and I became very close 25:40.160 --> 25:46.000 friends. He would walk past our house on Northumberland Street every day after work. 25:46.560 --> 25:52.160 And I would just be putting my cover on my typewriter and I would lean out the door and say, 25:52.160 --> 25:58.800 Herb, would you like a sherry? And Herb almost always would like a sherry. So he'd stop in 25:59.440 --> 26:06.000 and we'd talk for an hour, two hours. My journal says we talked this afternoon for three hours. 26:06.720 --> 26:11.520 What was on his mind at the time in terms of on the AI side of things? 26:12.160 --> 26:15.120 We didn't talk too much about AI. We talked about other things. Just life. 26:15.120 --> 26:24.480 We both love literature and Herb had read Proust in the original French twice all the way through. 26:25.280 --> 26:31.280 I can't. I read it in English in translation. So we talked about literature. We talked about 26:31.280 --> 26:37.120 languages. We talked about music because he loved music. We talked about art because he was 26:37.120 --> 26:45.840 he was actually enough of a painter that he had to give it up because he was afraid it was interfering 26:45.840 --> 26:53.120 with his research and so on. So no, it was really just chat chat, but it was very warm. 26:54.000 --> 26:59.840 So one summer I said to Herb, you know, my students have all the really interesting 26:59.840 --> 27:04.480 conversations. I was teaching at the University of Pittsburgh then in the English department. 27:04.480 --> 27:08.880 And, you know, they get to talk about the meaning of life and that kind of thing. 27:08.880 --> 27:15.200 And what do I have? I have university meetings where we talk about the photocopying budget and, 27:15.200 --> 27:20.160 you know, whether the course on romantic poetry should be one semester or two. 27:21.200 --> 27:25.760 So Herb laughed. He said, yes, I know what you mean. He said, but, you know, you could do something 27:25.760 --> 27:33.920 about that. Dot, that was his wife, Dot and I used to have a salon at the University of Chicago every 27:33.920 --> 27:42.400 Sunday night. And we would have essentially an open house. And people knew it wasn't for a small 27:42.400 --> 27:51.440 talk. It was really for some topic of depth. He said, but my advice would be that you choose 27:51.440 --> 27:59.200 the topic ahead of time. Fine, I said. So the following, we exchanged mail over the summer. 27:59.200 --> 28:09.120 That was US post in those days because you didn't have personal email. And I decided I would organize 28:09.120 --> 28:16.880 it. And there would be eight of us, Alan Nolan, his wife, Herb Simon, and his wife, Dorothea. 28:16.880 --> 28:27.040 There was a novelist in town, a man named Mark Harris. He had just arrived and his wife, Josephine. 28:27.840 --> 28:33.040 Mark was most famous then for a novel called Bang the Drum Slowly, which was about baseball. 28:34.160 --> 28:43.360 And Joe and me, so eight people. And we met monthly and we just sank our teeth into really 28:43.360 --> 28:52.160 hard topics. And it was great fun. How have your own views around artificial intelligence changed 28:53.200 --> 28:57.520 in through the process of writing machines who think and afterwards the ripple effects? 28:58.240 --> 29:04.400 I was a little skeptical that this whole thing would work out. It didn't matter. To me, it was 29:04.400 --> 29:16.160 so audacious. This whole thing being AI generally. And in some ways, it hasn't worked out the way I 29:16.160 --> 29:25.760 expected so far. That is to say, there is this wonderful lot of apps, thanks to deep learning 29:25.760 --> 29:35.680 and so on. But those are algorithmic. And in the part of symbolic processing, 29:36.640 --> 29:45.600 there is very little yet. And that's a field that lies waiting for industrious graduate students. 29:46.800 --> 29:53.040 Maybe you can tell me some figures that popped up in your life in the 80s with expert systems, 29:53.040 --> 30:01.840 where there was the symbolic AI possibilities of what most people think of as AI. If you dream 30:01.840 --> 30:08.000 of the possibilities of AI, it's really expert systems. And those hit a few walls and there 30:08.000 --> 30:12.960 were challenges there. And I think, yes, they will reemerge again with some new breakthroughs and so 30:12.960 --> 30:18.640 on. But what did that feel like, both the possibility and the winter that followed, the 30:18.640 --> 30:25.520 slowdown in research? This whole thing about AI winter is, to me, a crock. 30:26.160 --> 30:33.200 It's no winters. Because I look at the basic research that was being done in the 80s, which is 30:33.200 --> 30:39.520 supposed to be, my God, it was really important. It was laying down things that nobody had thought 30:39.520 --> 30:44.880 about before. But it was basic research. You couldn't monetize it. Hence the winter. 30:44.880 --> 30:53.680 Science research goes and fits and starts. It isn't this nice, smooth, 30:54.240 --> 30:59.200 oh, this follows this, follows this. No, it just doesn't work that way. 30:59.200 --> 31:03.600 Well, the interesting thing, the way winters happen, it's never the fault of the researchers. 31:04.480 --> 31:11.920 It's the some source of hype, over promising. Well, no, let me take that back. Sometimes it 31:11.920 --> 31:17.200 is the fault of the researchers. Sometimes certain researchers might overpromise the 31:17.200 --> 31:23.760 possibilities. They themselves believe that we're just a few years away, sort of just recently talked 31:23.760 --> 31:30.240 to Elon Musk and he believes he'll have an autonomous vehicle in a year and he believes it. 31:30.240 --> 31:33.520 A year? A year, yeah, would have mass deployment of a time. 31:33.520 --> 31:38.640 For the record, this is 2019 right now. So he's talking 2020. 31:38.640 --> 31:44.800 To do the impossible, you really have to believe it. And I think what's going to happen when you 31:44.800 --> 31:49.520 believe it, because there's a lot of really brilliant people around him, is some good stuff 31:49.520 --> 31:54.640 will come out of it. Some unexpected brilliant breakthroughs will come out of it. When you 31:54.640 --> 31:59.520 really believe it, when you work that hard. I believe that and I believe autonomous vehicles 31:59.520 --> 32:05.280 will come. I just don't believe it'll be in a year. I wish. But nevertheless, there's 32:05.280 --> 32:11.680 autonomous vehicles is a good example. There's a feeling many companies have promised by 2021, 32:11.680 --> 32:18.000 by 2022 for GM. Basically, every single automotive company has promised they'll 32:18.000 --> 32:22.480 have autonomous vehicles. So that kind of overpromise is what leads to the winter. 32:23.040 --> 32:28.320 Because we'll come to those dates, there won't be autonomous vehicles, and there'll be a feeling, 32:28.960 --> 32:34.160 well, wait a minute, if we took your word at that time, that means we just spent billions of 32:34.160 --> 32:41.600 dollars, had made no money. And there's a counter response to where everybody gives up on it. 32:41.600 --> 32:49.600 Sort of intellectually, at every level, the hope just dies. And all that's left is a few basic 32:49.600 --> 32:56.800 researchers. So you're uncomfortable with some aspects of this idea. Well, it's the difference 32:56.800 --> 33:04.160 between science and commerce. So you think science, science goes on the way it does? 33:06.480 --> 33:14.800 Science can really be killed by not getting proper funding or timely funding. I think 33:14.800 --> 33:22.080 Great Britain was a perfect example of that. The Lighthill report in the 1960s. 33:22.080 --> 33:27.360 The year essentially said, there's no use of Great Britain putting any money into this. 33:27.360 --> 33:35.600 It's going nowhere. And this was all about social factions in Great Britain. 33:36.960 --> 33:44.400 Edinburgh hated Cambridge, and Cambridge hated Manchester, and somebody else can write that 33:44.400 --> 33:53.760 story. But it really did have a hard effect on research there. Now, they've come roaring back 33:53.760 --> 34:01.360 with deep mind. But that's one guy and his visionaries around him. 34:01.360 --> 34:08.320 But just to push on that, it's kind of interesting, you have this dislike of the idea of an AI winter. 34:08.320 --> 34:15.440 Where's that coming from? Where were you? Oh, because I just don't think it's true. 34:16.560 --> 34:21.360 There was a particular period of time. It's a romantic notion, certainly. 34:21.360 --> 34:32.960 Yeah, well, I admire science, perhaps more than I admire commerce. Commerce is fine. Hey, 34:32.960 --> 34:42.960 you know, we all got to live. But science has a much longer view than commerce, 34:44.080 --> 34:54.000 and continues almost regardless. It can't continue totally regardless, but it almost 34:54.000 --> 34:59.600 regardless of what's saleable and what's not, what's monetizable and what's not. 34:59.600 --> 35:05.840 So the winter is just something that happens on the commerce side, and the science marches. 35:07.200 --> 35:12.560 That's a beautifully optimistic inspired message. I agree with you. I think 35:13.760 --> 35:19.440 if we look at the key people that work in AI, they work in key scientists in most disciplines, 35:19.440 --> 35:25.360 they continue working out of the love for science. You can always scrape up some funding 35:25.360 --> 35:33.120 to stay alive, and they continue working diligently. But there certainly is a huge 35:33.120 --> 35:39.840 amount of funding now, and there's a concern on the AI side and deep learning. There's a concern 35:39.840 --> 35:46.160 that we might, with over promising, hit another slowdown in funding, which does affect the number 35:46.160 --> 35:51.280 of students, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah, it does. So the kind of ideas you had 35:51.280 --> 35:56.400 in machines who think, did you continue that curiosity through the decades that followed? 35:56.400 --> 36:04.800 Yes, I did. And what was your view, historical view of how AI community evolved, the conversations 36:04.800 --> 36:11.520 about it, the work? Has it persisted the same way from its birth? No, of course not. It's just 36:11.520 --> 36:21.360 we were just talking. The symbolic AI really kind of dried up and it all became algorithmic. 36:22.400 --> 36:29.520 I remember a young AI student telling me what he was doing, and I had been away from the field 36:29.520 --> 36:34.080 long enough. I'd gotten involved with complexity at the Santa Fe Institute. 36:34.080 --> 36:40.960 I thought, algorithms, yeah, they're in the service of, but they're not the main event. 36:41.680 --> 36:49.200 No, they became the main event. That surprised me. And we all know the downside of this. We 36:49.200 --> 36:58.240 all know that if you're using an algorithm to make decisions based on a gazillion human decisions 36:58.240 --> 37:05.040 baked into it, are all the mistakes that humans make, the bigotries, the short sightedness, 37:06.000 --> 37:14.000 so on and so on. So you mentioned Santa Fe Institute. So you've written the novel Edge 37:14.000 --> 37:21.200 of Chaos, but it's inspired by the ideas of complexity, a lot of which have been extensively 37:21.200 --> 37:30.160 explored at the Santa Fe Institute. It's another fascinating topic of just sort of 37:31.040 --> 37:37.600 emergent complexity from chaos. Nobody knows how it happens really, but it seems to wear 37:37.600 --> 37:44.160 all the interesting stuff that does happen. So how do first, not your novel, but just 37:44.160 --> 37:49.520 complexity in general in the work at Santa Fe fit into the bigger puzzle of the history of AI? 37:49.520 --> 37:53.520 Or it may be even your personal journey through that. 37:54.480 --> 38:03.040 One of the last projects I did concerning AI in particular was looking at the work of 38:03.040 --> 38:12.960 Harold Cohen, the painter. And Harold was deeply involved with AI. He was a painter first. 38:12.960 --> 38:27.600 And what his project, Aaron, which was a lifelong project, did, was reflect his own cognitive 38:27.600 --> 38:34.800 processes. Okay. Harold and I, even though I wrote a book about it, we had a lot of friction between 38:34.800 --> 38:44.560 us. And I went, I thought, this is it, you know, the book died. It was published and fell into a 38:44.560 --> 38:53.040 ditch. This is it. I'm finished. It's time for me to do something different. By chance, 38:53.040 --> 38:59.280 this was a sabbatical year for my husband. And we spent two months at the Santa Fe Institute 38:59.280 --> 39:09.200 and two months at Caltech. And then the spring semester in Munich, Germany. Okay. Those two 39:09.200 --> 39:19.520 months at the Santa Fe Institute were so restorative for me. And I began to, the institute was very 39:19.520 --> 39:26.240 small then. It was in some kind of office complex on old Santa Fe trail. Everybody kept their door 39:26.240 --> 39:33.440 open. So you could crack your head on a problem. And if you finally didn't get it, you could walk 39:33.440 --> 39:42.480 in to see Stuart Kaufman or any number of people and say, I don't get this. Can you explain? 39:43.680 --> 39:51.120 And one of the people that I was talking to about complex adaptive systems was Murray Gellemann. 39:51.120 --> 39:58.960 And I told Murray what Harold Cohen had done. And I said, you know, this sounds to me 39:58.960 --> 40:06.080 like a complex adaptive system. And he said, yeah, it is. Well, what do you know? Harold's 40:06.080 --> 40:12.560 Aaron had all these kissing cousins all over the world in science and in economics and so on and 40:12.560 --> 40:21.200 so forth. I was so relieved. I thought, okay, your instincts are okay. You're doing the right thing. I 40:21.200 --> 40:25.920 didn't have the vocabulary. And that was one of the things that the Santa Fe Institute gave me. 40:25.920 --> 40:31.040 If I could have rewritten that book, no, it had just come out. I couldn't rewrite it. I would have 40:31.040 --> 40:37.680 had a vocabulary to explain what Aaron was doing. Okay. So I got really interested in 40:37.680 --> 40:47.440 what was going on at the Institute. The people were again, bright and funny and willing to explain 40:47.440 --> 40:54.800 anything to this amateur. George Cowan, who was then the head of the Institute, said he thought it 40:54.800 --> 41:02.160 might be a nice idea if I wrote a book about the Institute. And I thought about it. And I had my 41:02.160 --> 41:08.960 eye on some other project. God knows what. And I said, oh, I'm sorry, George. Yeah, I'd really love 41:08.960 --> 41:13.840 to do it. But, you know, just not going to work for me at this moment. And he said, oh, too bad. 41:13.840 --> 41:18.560 I think it would make an interesting book. Well, he was right and I was wrong. I wish I'd done it. 41:18.560 --> 41:24.080 But that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that, that that was a road not taken that I wish 41:24.080 --> 41:32.400 I'd taken. Well, you know what? That's just on that point. It's quite brave for you as a writer, 41:32.400 --> 41:39.680 as sort of coming from a world of literature, the literary thinking and historical thinking. I mean, 41:39.680 --> 41:52.640 just from that world and bravely talking to quite, I assume, large egos in AI or in complexity and so 41:52.640 --> 42:00.560 on. How'd you do it? Like, where did you? I mean, I suppose they could be intimidated of you as well, 42:00.560 --> 42:06.160 because it's two different worlds. I never picked up that anybody was intimidated by me. 42:06.160 --> 42:11.040 But how were you brave enough? Where did you find the guts to just dumb, dumb luck? I mean, 42:11.680 --> 42:16.160 this is an interesting rock to turn over. I'm going to write a book about and you know, 42:16.160 --> 42:21.840 people have enough patience with writers, if they think they're going to end up at a book 42:21.840 --> 42:27.840 that they let you flail around and so on. It's well, but they also look if the writer has. 42:27.840 --> 42:33.440 There's like, if there's a sparkle in their eye, if they get it. Yeah, sure. Right. When were you 42:33.440 --> 42:44.480 at the Santa Fe Institute? The time I'm talking about is 1990. Yeah, 1990, 1991, 1992. But we then, 42:44.480 --> 42:49.920 because Joe was an external faculty member, we're in Santa Fe every summer, we bought a house there. 42:49.920 --> 42:55.600 And I didn't have that much to do with the Institute anymore. I was writing my novels, 42:55.600 --> 43:04.320 I was doing whatever I was doing. But I loved the Institute and I loved 43:06.720 --> 43:12.960 the, again, the audacity of the ideas. That really appeals to me. 43:12.960 --> 43:22.160 I think that there's this feeling, much like in great institutes of neuroscience, for example, 43:23.040 --> 43:29.840 that they're in it for the long game of understanding something fundamental about 43:29.840 --> 43:36.800 reality and nature. And that's really exciting. So if we start not to look a little bit more recently, 43:36.800 --> 43:49.280 how AI is really popular today. How is this world, you mentioned algorithmic, but in general, 43:50.080 --> 43:54.320 is the spirit of the people, the kind of conversations you hear through the grapevine 43:54.320 --> 44:00.160 and so on, is that different than the roots that you remember? No, the same kind of excitement, 44:00.160 --> 44:07.120 the same kind of, this is really going to make a difference in the world. And it will, it has. 44:07.120 --> 44:13.280 A lot of folks, especially young, 20 years old or something, they think we've just found something 44:14.080 --> 44:21.040 special here. We're going to change the world tomorrow. On a time scale, do you have 44:22.000 --> 44:27.120 a sense of what, of the time scale at which breakthroughs in AI happen? 44:27.120 --> 44:39.040 I really don't, because look at deep learning. That was, Jeffrey Hinton came up with the algorithm 44:39.920 --> 44:48.960 in 86. But it took all these years for the technology to be good enough to actually 44:48.960 --> 44:57.680 be applicable. So no, I can't predict that at all. I can't, I wouldn't even try. 44:58.320 --> 45:05.440 Well, let me ask you to, not to try to predict, but to speak to the, I'm sure in the 60s, 45:06.000 --> 45:10.320 as it continues now, there's people that think, let's call it, we can call it this 45:11.040 --> 45:17.120 fun word, the singularity. When there's a phase shift, there's some profound feeling where 45:17.120 --> 45:23.040 we're all really surprised by what's able to be achieved. I'm sure those dreams are there. 45:23.040 --> 45:29.200 I remember reading quotes in the 60s and those continued. How have your own views, 45:29.200 --> 45:34.960 maybe if you look back, about the timeline of a singularity changed? 45:37.040 --> 45:45.760 Well, I'm not a big fan of the singularity as Ray Kurzweil has presented it. 45:45.760 --> 45:52.480 But how would you define the Ray Kurzweil? How would you, how do you think of singularity in 45:52.480 --> 45:58.880 those? If I understand Kurzweil's view, it's sort of, there's going to be this moment when 45:58.880 --> 46:06.320 machines are smarter than humans and, you know, game over. However, the game over is, 46:06.320 --> 46:10.800 I mean, do they put us on a reservation? Do they, et cetera, et cetera. And 46:10.800 --> 46:19.840 first of all, machines are smarter than humans in some ways, all over the place. And they have been 46:19.840 --> 46:27.280 since adding machines were invented. So it's not, it's not going to come like some great 46:27.280 --> 46:34.320 edible crossroads, you know, where they meet each other and our offspring, Oedipus says, 46:34.320 --> 46:41.040 you're dead. It's just not going to happen. Yeah. So it's already game over with calculators, 46:41.040 --> 46:47.920 right? They're already out to do much better at basic arithmetic than us. But, you know, 46:47.920 --> 46:55.840 there's a human like intelligence. And that's not the ones that destroy us. But, you know, 46:55.840 --> 47:01.520 somebody that you can have as a, as a friend, you can have deep connections with that kind of 47:01.520 --> 47:07.680 passing the Turing test and beyond, those kinds of ideas. Have you dreamt of those? 47:07.680 --> 47:08.880 Oh, yes, yes, yes. 47:08.880 --> 47:10.160 Those possibilities. 47:10.160 --> 47:17.520 In a book I wrote with Ed Feigenbaum, there's a little story called the geriatric robot. And 47:18.880 --> 47:24.240 how I came up with the geriatric robot is a story in itself. But here's, here's what the 47:24.240 --> 47:29.520 geriatric robot does. It doesn't just clean you up and feed you and will you out into the sun. 47:29.520 --> 47:42.720 It's great advantages. It listens. It says, tell me again about the great coup of 73. 47:43.520 --> 47:52.080 Tell me again about how awful or how wonderful your grandchildren are and so on and so forth. 47:53.040 --> 47:59.440 And it isn't hanging around to inherit your money. It isn't hanging around because it can't get 47:59.440 --> 48:08.320 any other job. This is its job and so on and so forth. Well, I would love something like that. 48:09.120 --> 48:15.600 Yeah. I mean, for me, that deeply excites me. So I think there's a lot of us. 48:15.600 --> 48:20.880 Lex, you got to know it was a joke. I dreamed it up because I needed to talk to college students 48:20.880 --> 48:26.880 and I needed to give them some idea of what AI might be. And they were rolling in the aisles 48:26.880 --> 48:32.160 as I elaborated and elaborated and elaborated. When it went into the book, 48:34.320 --> 48:40.240 they took my hide off in the New York Review of Books. This is just what we've thought about 48:40.240 --> 48:44.400 these people in AI. They're inhuman. Oh, come on. Get over it. 48:45.120 --> 48:49.120 Don't you think that's a good thing for the world that AI could potentially... 48:49.120 --> 48:58.800 Why? I do. Absolutely. And furthermore, I want... I'm pushing 80 now. By the time I need help 48:59.360 --> 49:04.160 like that, I also want it to roll itself in a corner and shut the fuck up. 49:06.960 --> 49:09.920 Let me linger on that point. Do you really, though? 49:09.920 --> 49:11.040 Yeah, I do. Here's what. 49:11.040 --> 49:15.120 But you wanted to push back a little bit a little. 49:15.120 --> 49:21.520 But I have watched my friends go through the whole issue around having help in the house. 49:22.480 --> 49:29.760 And some of them have been very lucky and had fabulous help. And some of them have had people 49:29.760 --> 49:35.120 in the house who want to keep the television going on all day, who want to talk on their phones all day. 49:35.760 --> 49:38.960 No. So basically... Just roll yourself in the corner. 49:38.960 --> 49:45.760 Unfortunately, us humans, when we're assistants, we care... We're still... 49:45.760 --> 49:48.400 Even when we're assisting others, we care about ourselves more. 49:48.400 --> 49:49.280 Of course. 49:49.280 --> 49:56.800 And so you create more frustration. And a robot AI assistant can really optimize 49:57.360 --> 50:03.040 the experience for you. I was just speaking to the point... You actually bring up a very, 50:03.040 --> 50:07.120 very good point. But I was speaking to the fact that us humans are a little complicated, 50:07.120 --> 50:14.560 that we don't necessarily want a perfect servant. I don't... Maybe you disagree with that. 50:14.560 --> 50:21.360 But there's... I think there's a push and pull with humans. 50:22.240 --> 50:28.080 A little tension, a little mystery that, of course, that's really difficult for you to get right. 50:28.080 --> 50:35.120 But I do sense, especially in today with social media, that people are getting more and more 50:35.120 --> 50:42.000 lonely, even young folks. And sometimes, especially young folks, that loneliness, 50:42.000 --> 50:47.760 there's a longing for connection. And AI can help alleviate some of that loneliness. 50:48.560 --> 50:52.880 Some. Just somebody who listens. Like in person. 50:54.640 --> 50:54.960 That... 50:54.960 --> 50:55.680 So to speak. 50:56.240 --> 51:00.080 So to speak, yeah. So to speak. 51:00.080 --> 51:07.120 Yeah, that to me is really exciting. But so if we look at that level of intelligence, 51:07.120 --> 51:12.560 which is exceptionally difficult to achieve, actually, as the singularity, or whatever, 51:12.560 --> 51:18.320 that's the human level bar, that people have dreamt of that too. Touring dreamt of it. 51:19.520 --> 51:26.320 He had a date timeline. Do you have how of your own timeline evolved on past time? 51:26.320 --> 51:27.520 I don't even think about it. 51:27.520 --> 51:28.240 You don't even think? 51:28.240 --> 51:35.520 No. Just this field has been so full of surprises for me. 51:35.520 --> 51:39.120 That you're just taking in and see a fun bunch of basic science? 51:39.120 --> 51:45.840 Yeah, I just can't. Maybe that's because I've been around the field long enough to think, 51:45.840 --> 51:52.240 you know, don't go that way. Herb Simon was terrible about making these predictions of 51:52.240 --> 51:53.840 when this and that would happen. 51:53.840 --> 51:54.320 Right. 51:54.320 --> 51:58.400 And he was a sensible guy. 51:58.400 --> 52:01.600 Yeah. And his quotes are often used, right, as a... 52:01.600 --> 52:02.880 That's a legend, yeah. 52:02.880 --> 52:13.840 Yeah. Do you have concerns about AI, the existential threats that many people like Elon Musk and 52:13.840 --> 52:16.160 Sam Harris and others that are thinking about? 52:16.160 --> 52:21.200 Oh, yeah, yeah. That takes up a half a chapter in my book. 52:21.200 --> 52:27.120 I call it the male gaze. 52:27.120 --> 52:35.200 Well, you hear me out. The male gaze is actually a term from film criticism. 52:36.240 --> 52:40.640 And I'm blocking on the woman who dreamed this up. 52:41.280 --> 52:48.880 But she pointed out how most movies were made from the male point of view, that women were 52:48.880 --> 52:55.520 objects, not subjects. They didn't have any agency and so on and so forth. 52:56.080 --> 53:00.560 So when Elon and his pals, Hawking and so on, 53:00.560 --> 53:05.760 okay, AI is going to eat our lunch and our dinner and our midnight snack too, 53:06.640 --> 53:11.600 I thought, what? And I said to Ed Feigenbaum, oh, this is the first guy. 53:11.600 --> 53:14.880 First, these guys have always been the smartest guy on the block. 53:14.880 --> 53:20.880 And here comes something that might be smarter. Ooh, let's stamp it out before it takes over. 53:20.880 --> 53:23.360 And Ed laughed. He said, I didn't think about it that way. 53:24.080 --> 53:30.320 But I did. I did. And it is the male gaze. 53:32.000 --> 53:37.120 Okay, suppose these things do have agency. Well, let's wait and see what happens. 53:37.120 --> 53:47.040 Can we imbue them with ethics? Can we imbue them with a sense of empathy? 53:48.560 --> 53:54.960 Or are they just going to be, I don't know, we've had centuries of guys like that? 53:55.760 --> 54:03.600 That's interesting that the ego, the male gaze is immediately threatened. 54:03.600 --> 54:12.320 And so you can't think in a patient, calm way of how the tech could evolve. 54:13.280 --> 54:21.520 Speaking of which, here in 96 book, The Future of Women, I think at the time and now, certainly now, 54:21.520 --> 54:27.760 I mean, I'm sorry, maybe at the time, but I'm more cognizant of now, is extremely relevant. 54:27.760 --> 54:34.160 And you and Nancy Ramsey talk about four possible futures of women in science and tech. 54:35.120 --> 54:42.400 So if we look at the decades before and after the book was released, can you tell a history, 54:43.120 --> 54:50.560 sorry, of women in science and tech and how it has evolved? How have things changed? Where do we 54:50.560 --> 55:01.520 stand? Not enough. They have not changed enough. The way that women are ground down in computing is 55:02.320 --> 55:09.680 simply unbelievable. But what are the four possible futures for women in tech from the book? 55:10.800 --> 55:16.720 What you're really looking at are various aspects of the present. So for each of those, 55:16.720 --> 55:22.800 you could say, oh, yeah, we do have backlash. Look at what's happening with abortion and so on and so 55:22.800 --> 55:31.280 forth. We have one step forward, one step back. The golden age of equality was the hardest chapter 55:31.280 --> 55:37.040 to write. And I used something from the Santa Fe Institute, which is the sand pile effect, 55:37.760 --> 55:44.480 that you drop sand very slowly onto a pile, and it grows and it grows and it grows until 55:44.480 --> 55:56.640 suddenly it just breaks apart. And in a way, MeToo has done that. That was the last drop of sand 55:56.640 --> 56:02.800 that broke everything apart. That was a perfect example of the sand pile effect. And that made 56:02.800 --> 56:07.440 me feel good. It didn't change all of society, but it really woke a lot of people up. 56:07.440 --> 56:15.760 But are you in general optimistic about maybe after MeToo? MeToo is about a very specific kind 56:15.760 --> 56:21.920 of thing. Boy, solve that and you'll solve everything. But are you in general optimistic 56:21.920 --> 56:27.600 about the future? Yes, I'm a congenital optimistic. I can't help it. 56:28.400 --> 56:35.600 What about AI? What are your thoughts about the future of AI? Of course, I get asked, 56:35.600 --> 56:41.280 what do you worry about? And the one thing I worry about is the things we can't anticipate. 56:44.320 --> 56:47.440 There's going to be something out of that field that we will just say, 56:47.440 --> 56:59.040 we weren't prepared for that. I am generally optimistic. When I first took up being interested 56:59.040 --> 57:06.560 in AI, like most people in the field, more intelligence was like more virtue. What could be 57:06.560 --> 57:15.760 bad? And in a way, I still believe that, but I realize that my notion of intelligence has 57:15.760 --> 57:22.240 broadened. There are many kinds of intelligence, and we need to imbue our machines with those many 57:22.240 --> 57:32.720 kinds. So you've now just finished or in the process of finishing the book, even working on 57:32.720 --> 57:40.160 the memoir. How have you changed? I know it's just writing, but how have you changed the process? 57:40.800 --> 57:48.880 If you look back, what kind of stuff did it bring up to you that surprised you looking at the entirety 57:48.880 --> 58:01.200 of it all? The biggest thing, and it really wasn't a surprise, is how lucky I was, oh my, to be, 58:03.680 --> 58:08.880 to have access to the beginning of a scientific field that is going to change the world. 58:08.880 --> 58:20.880 How did I luck out? And yes, of course, my view of things has widened a lot. 58:23.040 --> 58:32.080 If I can get back to one feminist part of our conversation, without knowing it, it really 58:32.080 --> 58:40.400 was subconscious. I wanted AI to succeed because I was so tired of hearing that intelligence was 58:40.400 --> 58:47.920 inside the male cranium. And I thought if there was something out there that wasn't a male 58:49.360 --> 58:57.120 thinking and doing well, then that would put a lie to this whole notion of intelligence resides 58:57.120 --> 59:04.560 in the male cranium. I did not know that until one night, Harold Cohen and I were 59:05.760 --> 59:12.560 having a glass of wine, maybe two, and he said, what drew you to AI? And I said, oh, you know, 59:12.560 --> 59:18.080 smartest people I knew, great project, blah, blah, blah. And I said, and I wanted something 59:18.080 --> 59:30.640 besides male smarts. And it just bubbled up out of me, Lex. It's brilliant, actually. So AI really 59:32.160 --> 59:36.080 humbles all of us and humbles the people that need to be humbled the most. 59:37.040 --> 59:43.440 Let's hope. Oh, wow, that is so beautiful. Pamela, thank you so much for talking to 59:43.440 --> 59:49.440 us. Oh, it's been a great pleasure. Thank you.