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Artificial Intelligence, Author, Berkeley, Feigenbaum, Obit, Obituary, photo, Portrait, Rememberance, Scamahorn
Pamela McCorduck (1940-2021) was my friend in 1981 and came to my home for discussions on Wednesday evenings that Kevin Langdon organized. She had recently published Machines Who Think, a history of the computer geeks creating AI (Artificial Intelligence). She had known and worked with many of them for decades. I felt unworthy of hosting those celebrities who were her friends, but my home and living room were conveniently located in central Berkeley.
It wasn’t until my level of social development matured that I realized Pamela was an ideal human being. She was always helpful! In that way, she reminded me of my mother’s mother, who was largely responsible for raising me. However, there were so many women like that in my life that it never occurred to me that they were special. But, even by that high standard, Pamela was special.
In those months that I knew her, we played a few writing games, like my Bend, Oregon writing group’s randomly created challenges. Being an author, she was always working on a new book. Little did I know the book she was working on when I knew her would be published in 1983 as The Fifth Generation – Artificial Intelligence and Japan’s Computer Challenge to the World.
My ever-resourceful librarian wife quickly recovered a copy from our mountains of indexed books, and it was so new looking that it appeared to have been read only once. I started reading it again, and after the two introductory pages, the book begins with a paragraph about Sun Tzu and his book “The Art of War,” with the concluding sentence being: “Knowledge,” says Sun Tzu, “is power and permits the wise sovereign and the benevolent general to attack without risk, conquer without bloodshed, and accomplish deeds surpassing all others.¹” And, there in the “NOTES, page 260 – ¹. Tao and War, Lao Tzu and Sun Tzu, trans. Charles Scamahorn (Berkeley, CA, private printing, 1977).” Apparently, I had given her a copy of that book I had printed but never widely distributed. Pamela must have found that line to be a helpful introductory statement for her seeking new ways to explore and use information.
I probably bought her book soon after it was published and didn’t remember reading that line that was the opening quote from that seminal book about information. The lead author wasn’t Pamela McCorduck but her long-time friend and colleague Edward A. Feigenbaum. Some well-informed people consider him to be the father of Artificial Intelligence and gave him the ACM Turing Award in 1994.
In my fifty years in Berkeley, I spent almost every evening in coffee shops like the Caffè Mediterraneum, on the 2400 block of Telegraph Avenue. I lived as a desultory coffee-shop raconteur in the evenings and a Berkeley campus troll of exciting lectures in the day. It was a fantastic life of constantly meeting incredibly productive people! And I enjoyed being the almost invisible spark that ignited many well-known events. But my relationship with Pamela McCorduck was always quiet, thoughtful, intelligent, future-oriented to creative things. And, as I said above, always helpful because that was at the core of her character. I suspect that everyone who knew her would agree that she was an ideal human being.
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