This Could Be Important: My Life and Times With the Artificial Intelligentsia, Pamela McCorduck2019-10-01 ()⁠:

[web version] Pamela McCorduck wrote the first modern history of artificial intelligence, Machines Who Think, and spent much time pulling on the sleeves of public intellectuals, futilely trying to suggest that artificial intelligence could be important. Memoir, social history, group biography of the founding fathers of AI, This Could Be Important [ISBN 9780359901388] follows the personal story of one AI spectator, from her early enthusiasms to her mature, more nuanced observations of the field.

In the autumn of 1960, 20yo humanities student Pamela McCorduck encountered both the fringe science of early artificial intelligence, and C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures lecture on the chasm between the sciences and the humanities. Each encounter shaped her life. Decades later her lifelong intuition was realized: AI and the humanities are profoundly connected. During that time, she wrote the first modern history of artificial intelligence, Machines Who Think, and spent much time pulling on the sleeves of public intellectuals, trying futilely to suggest that artificial intelligence could be important. Memoir, social history, group biography of the founding fathers of AI, This Could Be Important follows the personal story of one AI spectator, from her early enthusiasms to her mature, more nuanced observations of the field.

  1. The Two Cultures

    1. Living in the Exponential

    2. The Capacious Structure of Computational Rationality, Fast and Slow Thinking, an Intelligence Continuum

    3. The Two Cultures

    4. Thinking, Then and Now

    5. Learning a New Way of Thinking at Stanford

    6. Revolution in the Rust Belt

  2. Part 2: Brains

    1. Machines Who Think Is Conceived; John McCarthy Says Okay

    2. Over Christmas, We Invented a Thinking Machine

    3. What the First Thinking Machine Thought

    4. Herbert Simon
    5. Allen Newell
    6. The MIT Group
    7. Edward Feigenbaum
    8. Raj Reddy and the Dawn of Machine Learning

  3. Part 3: Culture Clash

    1. Whiplashed by the Manichean Struggle Between the Two Cultures

    2. A Turning Point

    3. Dissenters

    1. Photo Gallery

  5. Part 4: The World Discovers Artificial Intelligence

    1. Japan Wakes the World Up to AI

    2. Stragglers from the Wreck of Time

    3. A Long Dance with IBM

    4. Being a 9-Day Wonder

    5. Breaking and Entering into the House of the Humanities

  6. Part 5: Silicon Valley Sketchbook

    1. The Silicon Valley Sketchbook

  7. Part 6: Arts and Letters

    1. Art and Artificial Intelligence

    2. The Story as the Marker of Human Intelligence?

    3. The Digital Humanities

    4. Humanities Now and Forever

  8. Part 7: And Wherefore Was It Glorious?

    1. Elegies

    2. The Male Gaze

    3. A Dark Horse Comes Out of Nowhere

    4. Doing the Right Things

    5. This Could Be Important

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