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"Most of my life, it was a marginal science," says author McCorduck of artificial intelligence. "I am surprised that he has reached the public prominence he has now."

Forty-one years ago, Pamela McCorduck wrote a story of the still young field of artificial intelligence. It was incredibly ambitious, and the result was excellent academic work. He updated that book, Machines that think, twenty-five years later, and declared that he would not write another volume on the subject.

Fortunately for all of us, she returned to fulfill that vow. "There is a story of all this, a human story about the invention of artificial intelligence by a handful of brilliant scientists," he writes in This could be important, which went on sale last month (Carnegie Mellon Press).

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This could be important is wonderful and very different from that previous volume. Machines was an epic story that goes back to the dawn of humanity's quest to understand and, in a sense, create intelligence. If you read Machines and dedicate only the highlights to memory, you would be very, very knowledgeable about many things.

On the contrary, this could be important should be inhaled instead of being studied. "This is a very personal story," he said in a telephone interview with ZDNet. McCorduck has decided not to simply produce an update on the history of the field. Instead, he deepens, reflecting on his evolution over sixty years, from the point of view of first-hand meetings with the founding fathers of AI: the apostles, as he calls them, including John McCarthy, Allen Newell, Herb Simon, Ed Feigenbaum, Marvin Minsky and Raj Reddy.

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Why go back to all that? Because AI is a human story, it reminds us. Each science is formed in part by the idiosyncrasy of its practitioners, and that is true in the science of artificial intelligence. Whatever the AI is now and will be in the future, it is a product of people who do things.

Scientist Rodney Brooks once said that AI is "best characterized as the things that highly educated male scientists found challenging," a point on which McCorduck agrees. But it is not negative in his book. She knew those scientists, and clearly loved them.

"For me it has always been a spectator sport," McCorduck told ZDNet, but it was deeper than that. The book is alive with great affection for the brilliant minds of AI.

And what ideas are here! One sees the intellects of Herb Simon and Allen Newell reporting their first goals for AI. Simon and Newell created the first application for AI, The Logic Theorist. Their promises for the so-called symbolic AI were not fulfilled, perhaps because their bright minds were prone to set too ambitious goals.

Simon can read research papers in twenty languages and he can read for pleasure in half a dozen, he reminds us. "He was very competitive, with a disconcerting belief that, to win to count, he must come from behind."

Newell was equally bold. "He was a composer and director of the symphony of a deep mind, who guided you along new paths and seduced you with the audacity of his ideas."

From John McCarthy, who coined the term artificial intelligence, she remembers its intensity, as when he filed a petition against the Vietnam War in McCorduck and demanded that he sign it. "McCarthy waited, issuing a silent and indisputable justice. Sign."

"To be with McCarthy for a few moments was to be amazed, even restless, by his intensity," he writes.

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Things have changed a lot in the public conception of AI in the forty years since Machines. Back then, McCorduck had trouble getting his humanities colleagues to take his affection for nerds seriously.

"(The) weirdest part of this sixty-year story is that, for decades, I couldn't make intelligent and well-educated people believe that this could be important," he writes.

"Most of my life, it was a marginal science," McCorduck told ZDNet. "I am surprised that he has reached the public prominence he has now."

The apathy he received from others in the seventies has been replaced these days by a lot of fear, fear of what AI can do to society, to jobs, to privacy.

"The first thing I was eager to do was make it clear that these people who were doing this were not monsters that were going to take over the world," McCorduck told ZDNet.

There is an optimism throughout This could be important. John McCarthy had it, he writes, "a wonderful and intelligent optimism," the belief that something as mysterious as intelligence could be achieved in a machine. "He is completely at home with technology and marvels at the prejudice that so many people have against them," McCorduck recalls writing in his notebook at the time.

That optimism is also from McCorduck. "You know, this is really amazing, the great & # 39; we & # 39; collective have produced intelligence in ways we would never have dreamed possible," he said by phone. "This is transcendental."

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For McCorduck, AI will be a net positive result as humans navigate their increasingly complex world. "We need help in every way, this is not a perfect world in any way," he told ZDNet, echoing the thoughts of the futurist Tim O & # 39; Reilly. "We need all the help we can get."

For those concerned with jobs, she believes that "many professions have been replaced" by technology for hundreds of years. "It happened with the employees in the 19th century, they left, this will happen again and again," he told ZDNet.

For those who doubt that AI is really "smart," McCorduck rolls his eyes. Over the years, intelligence objectives continue to change. "Although a lot of noise and fury have revolved around whether machines really think (as humans do) or are just pretending it, that tired dispute bores me," he writes.

In fact, she is convinced by AI's progress over the decades that "the time when a computer exhibits a large set of complete human cognitive behaviors may be coming," he writes.

In fact, one aspect that will make this important, whether exciting or scary, or absurd, according to the reader, is that McCorduck believes that we are already at the heart of AI. It is not a future development for her. "The next few years will see profound changes," he writes. "In short, AI already surrounds us. It's us."

She is far from blas, however. "If I consider a very long vision, I think we will have to rewrite the social contract to put more emphasis on the primacy of human beings and their interests," McCorduck told ZDNet. "In the last forty years or more, the value of one has been described in terms of net worth, exactly how much money you have or assets," a situation that "seems pretty horrible," he said. "There are other ways to measure human value."

McCorduck has not deliberately searched for the kind of comprehensive study of AI technology in this volume he conducted in Machines. In part, it is because a complete corpus of magazines and books has emerged to fill the void in the forty-one years since the last book. In part it is because the deep learning approach that dominates AI these days does not delight her as the approaches of McCarthy and others did.

"My point of view is largely a point of view of symbolic intelligence," he told ZDNet, "I find it more interesting than statistical things." A shame, however, one thinks, that she didn't have the same close relationships with today's AI heroes, Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun. She is such a good observer of character, one craves the same ideas about those scientists.

Will there be a shift towards the forms of symbolic processing? While warning that it is dangerous to try to predict what things will come to light, McCorduck said the wires in AI have gone only to return years later. In a sense, the field may need to "go and push along the other end of the continuum," he offered, which means, "how do we move on this issue around the symbolism in which humans are really good?"

Despite his affection for the apostles, McCorduck is aware that the composition of the AI field is changing, and for the better. "Someone said, I forgot who, at the beginning of the 21st century created a completely new field that perfectly reflects European medievalist society," he told ZDNet. "You don't need women or people of color."

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Women and minorities are participating, he said, "but not in the numbers they should be participating in," with perhaps only twenty percent of the major AI research papers written by women, for example. "It's crazy," he said, before adding, "it will change."

"Fei-Fei Li at Stanford has said that it is AI for everyone, not just a group of white men," McCorduck said, referring to the AI professor at Stanford University. The diversity problems only highlight that there is much at stake both in the field of AI and its role in society, something that McCorduck anticipated so many years ago when he tried to make people see that, well, everything could be important some day.

It is ironic that McCorduck had to defend his interest in artificial intelligence before his fellow scholars in humanities. In the current era of deep learning benchmarks, McCorduck's passion for AI is, on the contrary, remarkably humanistic. The questions that concern her in this could be important are precisely those that always occupied thinkers of all trends, including poets and novelists. Are we creating something in our own image and, if so, what will it reveal about ourselves? Will we be supplanted, will our creations turn against us or abandon us as Frankenstein de Shelley?

There is a commotion in this that could be important. Those pioneers I knew, the apostles, are gone now. "All flesh is like grass, and many of my teachers and mentors in artificial intelligence have died," McCorduck writes towards the end of the book. She is carrying on the tradition of big questions as one of the last participants of a time when big questions about intelligence were the norm.

In an era fearful and ignorant of AI, an era full of deceptive headlines about murderous robots, it is very fortunate for the world that an apostle remain to remind us that AI science has always been a very human endeavor.

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Read the original:

The minds that built AI and the writer who adored them. - Mash Viral