Pamela McCorduck

Pamela McCorduck arrived at artificial intelligence sideways, which turned out to be the right way to arrive. She was a writer, not a scientist—an English major from Berkeley who would later take an MFA at Columbia and publish novels—and what she brought to the field was a novelist's ear and a historian's patience with scale. Her landmark 1979 book Machines Who Think made a claim that still sounds radical to engineers who think of their work as pure problem-solving: that AI was not born in 1956 at Dartmouth but is the latest chapter of a story humanity has been telling itself for three thousand years, a story about the wish to make a thinking artifact, to forge a mind outside the body. The engineers she chronicled were, without knowing it, the heirs of poets and prophets and mystics, completing a longing as old as the Iliad. McCorduck gave the field its