Mccorduck's-Machines Who-Think After-Twenty-Five Years-Revisiting

AI Magazine Volume 24 Number 4 (2003) (© AAAI) Book Review

pecially ones not so intent on por- traying the genesis of AI as occurring McCorduck’s in splendid isolation from other dis- ciplinary innovations growing out of WWII and, in particular, one more Machines Who closely bound with certain specific applied concerns found in that era. McCorduck conceded in her book Think after that her account was unabashedly personal and impressionistic, but she did not reveal the extent to which it had been colored by her own close Twenty-Five Years personal relations with some of the early members of the Carnegie Mel- lon University Computer Science De- Revisiting the partment. In its execution, Machines tended to be dominated by the viewpoint of Herbert Simon in ways both Origins of AI big and small. In everything from its elevation of the symbol-processing approach to center stage (already somewhat outdated by the later Philip Mirowski 1970s), to its expressions of disdain for philosophers, to its treatment of John von Neumann’s later position on computer intelligence as some- how perversely misguided, to the ■ Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry point precision at the Dartmouth choice of the Dartmouth conference into the History and Prospect of Artificial summer conference of 1956; and as the pivotal event in the history of Intelligence, Pamela McCorduck, San then an upward trend, punctuated by AI, the text is redolent of Simon’s ex- Francisco, California, Freeman, 1979, periodic bouts of soul searching. The 375 pp., ISBN 0-7167-11135-4. uberant opinions and personality. frame tale provided therein was basi- However, there was one observation cally that AI was “an idea that has made by Simon (as well as his collab- pervaded Western intellectual histo- orators) that unaccountably receives ry, a dream in urgent need of being ver the course of the last half- no attention in the book. As Simon realized” (p. xii) and that this innate century, a number of books admitted numerous times, both in primal urge to build little simulacra have sought to explain AI to interviews and in print, O of ourselves (along with the obvious a larger audience and many more de- The history of AI goes back ... al- fact of the technological develop- voted to writing the formal history of most to the beginnings of opera- AI. It is a tribute to her powers of ob- ment of the computer in World War tions research. It is instructive to servation and her conversational II) was and is sufficient to explain the look at that early history in or- style that none has really proven rise of the new science. The primary der to see why the two disci- more successful than Pamela McCor- principle of selection governing her plines did not develop more duck’s Machines Who Think,1 now ap- account is that AI “did not originate nearly synchronously and with proaching the quarter-century mark. in the search for solutions to practi- closer relation to each other…. Currently, it is the first source cited cal problems…. I like to think of arti- [I]n the decade after 1955, the on the AI Topics web site on the his- ficial intelligence as the scientific tools of AI were applied side by tory of AI. Based on extensive inter- apotheosis of a veritable cultural tra- side with OR tools to problems views with many of the early key dition” (p. 29). of management…. [T}hese pio- players, it managed to forge the tem- These principles of selection pro- neering applications of AI meth- plate for most subsequent histories, duced a sleek narrative that was very ods to management were not 2 in the sense of providing them both internalist, which is perhaps one followed up. After about 1960, the time line and the larger frame reason the story line has been very AI and OR went their separate tale. The time line consisted of an ex- popular in pedagogical contexts, ways; whole new generations of tended prehistory, encompassing iso- such as textbooks.3 However, recent scientists trained in these disci- lated attempts to mechanize thought historical research, which includes a plines were largely unacquaint- and construct various automata, all reexamination of McCorduck’s own ed with the techniques provided treated with bemused condescension; interview transcripts, has begun to by the other (Simon 1987, pp. 8, a turning point located with pin- uncover other possible narratives, es- 10).

In her interviews, J. C. Shaw, the events for the history of AI. Of native settings, dubbing it “complex joint author with Simon and Allen course, the path to understanding information processing.” The name Newell of the LOGIC THEORIST, explicit- this alternative version of the history never really caught on, but the at- ly rejected McCorduck’s frame tale: “I of AI passes directly though the histo- tractions of the term artificial intelli- saw artificial intelligence not as the ry of operations research, something gence had more than a little to do threat continually written about in we cannot even begin to recount with the predicament bequeathed by science fiction, but rather as a way of here.6 Nevertheless, the implications operations research. going beyond the limits of operations of the operations research connection Newell and Simon felt that the way research and the well-specified prob- do go some distance in helping to ex- to make maximum inroads into areas lems that could be run on computers plain all sorts of phenomena left dan- left untouched by operations research [at that time].”4 Perhaps because they gling by McCorduck as well as pro- was to remain studiously ambiguous suggested an entirely different genre viding a different perspective on about the primary goals of early at- of history of AI than the one she had some of the systemic controversies tempts to imbue computers with the envisioned, McCorduck passed such that have persisted in AI down to the notoriously elusive virtue of “intelli- comments by and chose not to fol- present. gence.” On the one hand, they often low up on them when they popped First, there are the fundamental portrayed their objective as the simu- up in the interviews. The only times contours of the early history of AI lation of aspects of human intelli- operations research gets mentioned that are left unexplained by McCor- gence to such a refined degree that in her text is in a comment about the duck but are illuminated when the computer might “replace” human early work of Charles Babbage (p. 24) viewed through the spectacles of op- beings, in the sense of occupying and in an acknowledgment in pass- erations research. There is, for exam- their bureaucratic locations within an ing that the notorious Newell-Simon ple, the timing of events, as hinted army or corporation; they were en- paper on the future successes of AI by the earlier quote from Simon. The thusiastic about the bureaucratic was originally delivered to the Opera- advent of AI was not a simple func- model of organizations to such an ex- tions Research Society of America (Si- tion of computer technology passing tent that Simon’s own heuristic guide mon and Newell 1958). McCorduck’s a certain threshold of development in his research was to portray the hu- preferred narrative was that a differ- but, rather, the result of a split from man mind as itself a bureaucratic hi- ent motley of fields, mostly those as- operations research of certain re- erarchy in miniature, as revealed in sociated with the natural sciences— search themes because of some per- his celebrated lectures The Sciences of primarily computer design, cybernet- ceived dissatisfaction with prior op- the Artificial. This side of Simon be- ics, mathematical psychology, and erations research approaches. came known as the cognitive psy- formal logic—all contributed compo- Operations research had prided itself chologist, and it is the vision of AI nent themes to the nascent science as providing scientific expertise for that provides the backbone for Mc- but that no single discipline managed decision making by experts external Corduck’s version of the history. It is to decisively shape the subsequent to the organization being studied, be also the side that garnished all the trajectory of early AI. Her treatment the client the military or the modern cultural dissension from the 1960s of cybernetics is particularly notable corporation. By the mid-1950s, oper- through the 1990s, from Hubert in this regard, given that the rejec- ations research had enjoyed some Dreyfus to John Searle to Roger Pen- tion of cybernetics in the format of successes in applications but was in rose. On the other hand, there was al- repudiation of concern with the em- danger of being relegated to the low- so the more pragmatic side to Newell bodiment of the architecture of intel- er rungs of the organizational hierar- and Simon, the one that sought to ligence in actual machines constitut- chy, consigned to provision of spe- provide their clients with discrete ed one of the foundation stones of cialized services, on a par with programs that would serve primarily her account as well as buttressed her accountancy or personnel manage- to augment human intelligence; that identification of Marvin Minsky, ment. Newell and Simon in particu- is, more precisely, to provide comput- John McCarthy and Newell and Si- lar argued that if operations research er technologies that would assist their mon as her main protagonists; cyber- were to become relevant to the high- users in carrying out their bureaucrat- netics constituted the failure that est reaches of the bureaucratic hierar- ic tasks, whether or not they actually pointed the way forward for AI.5 chy, it would have to extend the mimicked human cognition. It was Although the origins of any novel realm of competence of the opera- this side of the history that was alto- research program often have their tions researcher to expertise in the gether banished by McCorduck, with roots buried deep and wide in previ- intuitive and creative side of the sci- her peremptory dismissal of “solu- ous inquiries, the suppression of the entific process, dealing with the ill- tions of practical problems”; she role of operations research in the structured problems and strategic ori- closed her lone chapter on “applied genesis of AI has had important con- entations that were the bread and artificial intelligence” with the com- sequences for subsequent compre- butter of the chief executive officer ment, “any intelligent program that hension of the goals and ambitions or the four-star general. They called replaces professionals at what they do of the early community—and even for a new discipline to concern itself and get well-paid for … is going to for the relative significance of certain with problem solving in these alter- meet mighty resistance. But the facts

136 AI MAGAZINE Book Review are that no resistance has been recorded because no one has had the resources to attempt a large-scale The roots of AI in operations research not only shed transfer from the laboratory into the light on the capacity of the early discipline to pro- field” (p. 301). It was arguably this side of the history of AI that had ductively straddle the science- engineering divide been the most successful in maintain- but also go some distance in explaining other key ing the support of client groups as aspects of the history that McCorduck elides. well as absorbing the vast bulk of programming effort. This segment of the science adopted as its manifesto as business schools or departments of tory. Merrill Flood had already the famous J. C. Licklider (1960) pa- communication, viz., existing opera- thrown down the gauntlet in 1951: per entitled “Man-Computer Symbio- tions research sites, not to mention [N]obody really knows anything sis.” It was also the version of intelli- withstanding some initial hostility about consciousness. Now the gence that von Neumann (another from electrical engineers and com- purpose of Robotology is to take major figure in American operations puter scientists. Further, there was a hard problem such as this one research) adopted as his holy grail in the overwhelming dependence of the of consciousness, or a relatively the last decade of his life; moreover, early AI profession on military fund- easy one like the learning prob- it explains why both Minsky and Mc- ing and, in particular, on the Defense lem—I can feel the psychologists Carthy began their careers with such Advanced Research Projects Agency shudder as I say this—so that a close ties to von Neumann, only to (DARPA) from 1962 to 1975. This de- mixed team can be truly scientif- later repudiate these early enthusi- pendence becomes comprehensible ic in their work on them. asms. Von Neumann did not oppose once one realizes that Marvin Deni- Robotology, then, is a way of AI tout court, pace McCorduck; he coff at the Office of Naval Research solving the communication was only skeptical about the simu- and Licklider at DARPA were seen as problem in the sense that we lacrum account of its goals. Newell operating out of the operations re- don’t just let people talk philoso- and Simon believed that the best way search arms of their respective orga- phy, or methodology, or just to get a new scientific discipline off nizations and that they sold their en- plain hot air; they must talk in the ground was to remain deter- thusiasms as making useful terms of something to be put in- minedly agnostic about these goals contributions to decision theory, to the design of an object (p. 34). for as long as possible, and to blur command, control, communications McCorduck makes much of the the distinction between scientist and and logistics rather than having some statement that it was only Newell 7 engineer. Others, such as Minsky, innate urge to produce simulacra of and Simon who had a working pro- 9 tended to wax ironic concerning the humans. Indeed, McCorduck’s histo- gram to present to the public at the distinction: “Newell and Simon have ry entirely skirts the central impor- Dartmouth conference, but it was de- always pretended that they are inter- tance of the RAND Corporation for veloped at RAND, where there was al- ested in how humans work and we many of the earliest protagonists of ready a well-established ethos of hav- have pretended that we didn’t care AI. Far from this being an accident, ing to put your ideas into code before very much about that because it RAND was the premier incubator for you could claim to have made a real wouldn’t help much in getting a gen- the development of operations re- contribution to the science of intelli- eral theory of intelligence anyhow.”8 search and systems analysis in the gence. The term artificial intelligence encap- United States in the 1940s to 1960s Another peculiarity of the early his- sulated this program of ambiguity and, thus, contained the densest con- tory of AI that is explained by the op- better than other neologisms, and centration of computer programmers erations research connection is the this creative obfuscation of goals was in the world in the early 1950s. In- seeming retardation of the uptake of provided by the problem situation in deed, one could make the case that AI in Great Britain, a fact noted in operations research and not by for- the pivotal spatiotemporal event for passing by McCorduck (p. 68). Even mal logic, computer design, or math- the precipitation of AI out of the though Alan Turing’s 1950 paper is ematical psychology. motley of diverse fields having some- sometimes treated as the first calling The roots of AI in operations re- thing to do with the computer was card for the discipline of AI, and some search not only shed light on the ca- not at all the Dartmouth Confer- maintain it was the British who wrote pacity of the early discipline to pro- ence—McCorduck does acknowledge the first working program to play a ductively straddle the science- the disappointment of McCarthy, game of checkers, and British activity engineering divide but also go some Minsky, and Newell with their Dart- in cybernetics initially outstripped ef- distance in explaining other key as- mouth experience with a tinge of per- forts in the United States in the pects of the history that McCorduck plexity—but rather the previous con- 1950s, it is the general consensus that elides. For example, there was the vocation of the Applied Robotology British pursuit of AI was retarded for fact that AI had to find its initial uni- team at RAND in 1950 and its off- at least a decade, if not more, in com- versity location in such unusual units shoot, the Systems Research Labora- parison to U.S. efforts. This curious

WINTER 2003 137 Book Review turn of events is best accounted for by nificance for modern practice, con- References the differential status of operations re- trary to what the bulk of contempo- Bartree, T., ed. 1989. Expert Systems and AI. search in the United States and Great rary scientists might believe. Al- Indianapolis, Ind.: SAMS. Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. In though there are many schools Bowker, G. 1993. How to Be Universal. So- Great Britain, operations remained within contemporary AI research, cial Studies of Science 23(2): 107–127. stubbornly “low tech,” confined to one popular way of organizing the Flood, M. 1951. Report on a Seminar on rough-and-ready optimization tech- canon has been to recast the se- Organizational Science, P-7857, The niques and hands-on data collection; quence of topics in AI as progressive- RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, Cali- moreover, British operations research ly more complicated models of vari- fornia. did not exhibit the ambitions to scale ous kinds of agents with varying Fortun, M., and Schweber, S. 1993. Scien- the bureaucratic hierarchy that I at- degrees of perception, action, and au- tists and the Legacy of WWII. Social Stud- tributed to Simon and Newell earlier. tonomy. Indeed, since the 1980s, the ies of Science 23(6): 595–642. In the United States, operations re- AI community has opened up an ex- Heims, S. 1991. The Cybernetics Group. search more readily embraced the tensive dialogue with game theorists, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. computer both as a tool and a tem- economists, and a host of other social Johnson, S. 1997. Three Approaches to Big plate of the theory of organization, scientists who claim possession of Technology. Technology and Culture 38:891–919. which rendered the computational elaborate theories of agency.10 From Licklider, J. C. 1960. Man-Computer Sym- approach to intelligence more attrac- the current viewpoint, this move is biosis. IRE Transactions on Human Factors tive to the existing client base of the best understood as a return to a situa- in Electronics 1:4–11. operations researchers. tion that was disrupted during the Mirowski, P. 2002. Machine Dreams. New There were further technical conse- 1960s: The researchers in AI and op- York: Cambridge University Press quences of the initial incubation of erations research share so much in Nilsson, N. 1998. Artificial Intelligence: A AI within the operations research the way of heritage that it was only a New Synthesis. San Francisco: Morgan community as well—formal and matter of time before they realized Kaufmann. mathematical aspects that McCor- that their commonalties more than Norberg, A., and O’Neill, J. 1996. Trans- duck did not cover. For example, outweighed their differences. forming Computer Technology. Baltimore: more recent scholarship has begun to Johns Hopkins, 1996. take note of the structural similarities Notes Pickering, A. 2002. Cybernetics and the between the modeling choices made 1. The other serious history that aimed to Mangle. Social Studies of Science 32(5): by Simon and Minsky and the for- cross over into a popular account was 413–438. malisms then current in game theory Crevier, D. 1993. AI. New York: Basic. Rau, E. 1999. Combat Scientists, Ph.D. and decision theory. Search over deci- More scholarly accounts have been pro- thesis, Department of History, University sion trees in the form of exploration vided by Arthur Norberg, Brian Bloom- of Pennsylvania. graphs, minimax versus alpha-beta field, James Fleck, B. J. Copeland, Jon Simon, H. 1987. Two Heads Are Better procedures, strategic trade-offs be- Guice, Paul Edwards, and a host of others. Than One: The Collaboration between AI tween the position evaluation func- 2. Internalist is a term of historiography. It and OR. Interfaces 17(4): 8–15. tion and complexity of the problem means that the trajectory of an intellectual Simon, H., and Newell, A. 1958. Heuristic discussion is driven exclusively by contribu- representation, various attempts to Problem Solving: The Next Advance in tions narrowly construed as taking place formalize information in a game-the- Operations Research. Operations Research within a discipline or discourse community. 6:1–10. oretic context—the family resem- 3. For example, Nils Nilsson (1998). blances to formalisms innovated in Turing, A. 1950. Computing Machinery 4. Interview transcript, Pamela McCor- and Intelligence. Mind 59:433–460. operations research were quite perva- duck with J. C. Shaw, June 16, 1975, p. 31. sive. Likewise, early AI was closely Philip Mir- 5. Some recent reconsiderations of the tied to various forms of war gaming owski is the thesis of assertions of failure of cybernet- (and, thus, to the lucrative develop- Carl Koch ics are Pickering (2002); Bowker (1993); professor of ments of computer gaming and the and Heims (1991). economics entertainment industry) that itself 6. For some background, see Mirowski and policy was indebted for its existence to oper- (2002); Fortun and Schweber (1993); Rau studies and ations research. One upshot of this (1999); and Johnson (1997). fellow of the suppressed connection is that AI 7. See Newell’s admission of this fact in Reilly Center for the History and Philoso- owed at least as much in the way of Crevier (1993), p. 258. phy of Science at the University of Notre inspiration to a specific subset of Dame. He is the author of Machine Dreams 8. Interview transcript, Pamela McCor- (Cambridge, 2002), Science Bought and Sold postwar social sciences as it did to the duck with Marvin Minsky, October. 12, natural science concepts celebrated (Chicago, 2002), and Effortless Economy of 1974. Science? (Duke 2003). His recent work by McCorduck. 9. See Denicoff in Bartree (1989) and Nor- ranges from a history of early AI to docu- Thus, we come to the final consid- berg and O’Neill (1996). mentation of the effects of the recent eration that revisions in the genealo- 10. The extent to which these claims are commercialization of science policy. His e- gy of AI discussed earlier might in- valid is open to dispute. See Mirowski mail address is [email protected]. deed have some conceptual sig- (2002).

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