by Amy Webb
Betty Holberton, mathematician and one of the original programmers for the ENIAC computer. She invented breakpoints in computer debugging.
Grace Hopper, computer scientist and eventual creator of COBOL, an early programming language still in use today.
Mary Jackson, engineer and mathematician, who later became NASA’s first Black female engineer.
Kathleen McNulty, mathematician and one of the original programmers for the ENIAC computer.
Marlyn Meltzer, mathematician and one of the original programmers for the ENIAC computer, which was the first all-electronic programmable computer.
Rózsa Péter, mathematician and a founder of recursive function theory.
Frances Spence, mathematician and one of the original programmers for the ENIAC computer.
Ruth Teitelbaum, mathematician and one of the original programmers for the ENIAC computer. She, with fellow programmer Marlyn Meltzer, calculated ballistic trajectory equations.
Dorothy Vaughan, mathematician and human computer who in 1949 was the acting supervisor of the West Area Computers.
Jesse Ernest Wilkins Jr., nuclear scientist, mechanical engineer, and mathematician who became the University of Chicago’s youngest student at age 13.
20. “The Dartmouth Workshop—as Planned and as It Happened,” Stanford Computer Science Department’s Formal Reasoning Group, John McCarthy’s home page, lecture “AI: Past and Future,” last modified October 30, 2006, http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/slides/dartmouth/dartmouth/node1.html.
21. “The Dartmouth AI Archives,” RaySolomonoff.com, http://raysolomonoff.com/dartmouth/.
22. Irving John Good, “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine,” Advances in Computers, Volume 6 (1966): 31–88, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0065245808604180?via%3Dihub.
23. Joseph Weizenbaum, “ELIZA—A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine,” Communications of the ACM 9, no. 1 (January 1966): 36–45, http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs124/p36-weizenabaum.pdf.
24. Full script is on GitHub: https://github.com/codeanticode/eliza.
25. Ronald Kotulak, “New Machine Will Type Out What It ‘Hears,’” Chicago Tribune, June 18, 1963, accessed via Chicago Tribune archives (paywall).
26. Herbert A. Simon and Allen Newell, “Heuristic Problem Solving: The Next Advance in Operations Research,” Operations Research 6 (1958): 1–10.
27. McCarthy himself had wanted to work with the group on his ideas for representing commonsense knowledge and reasoning, but once the group was gathered, he realized that that matrix of participants was missing some key thinkers. (In his case, he hoped for logicians.)
28. Brad Darrach, “Meet Shaky, the First Electronic Person,” Life Magazine, November 20, 1970, Volume 69, 58B–58C.
29. National Research Council, Language and Machines: Computers in Translation and Linguistics (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 1966), 19. https://www.nap.edu/read/9547/chapter/1.
30. James Lighthill, “Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey,” Chilton Computing, July 1972, http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/reports/lighthill_report/p001.htm.
31. “Mind as Society with Marvin Minsky, PhD,” transcript from “Thinking Allowed, Conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery, with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove,” The Intuition Network, 1998, http://www.intuition.org/txt/minsky.htm.
32. Ibid.
33. The AI Winter included new predictions—this time in the form of warnings—for the future. In his book Computer Power and Human Reason, Weizenbaum argued that while artificial intelligence may be possible, we should never allow computers to make important decisions because computers will always lack human qualities such as compassion and wisdom. Weizenbaum makes the crucial distinction between deciding and choosing. Deciding is a computational activity, something that can be programmed. Choice, however, is the product of judgment, not calculation. It is the capacity to choose that ultimately makes us human. University of California, Berkeley, philosopher John Searle, in his paper “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” argued against the plausibility of general, or what he called “strong,” AI. Searle said a program cannot give a computer a “mind,” “understanding,” or “consciousness,” regardless of how humanlike the program might behave.
34. Jonathan Schaeffer, Robert Lake, Paul Lu, and Martin Bryant, “CHINOOK: The World Man-Machine Checkers Champion,” AI Magazine 17, no. 1 (Spring 1966): 21–29, https://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/viewFile/1208/1109.pdf.
35. Ari Goldfarb and Daniel Trefler, “AI and International Trade,” The National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2018, http://www.nber.org/papers/w24254.pdf.
36. Toby Manning, “AlphaGo,” British Go Journal 174 (Winter 2015–2016): 15, https://www.britgo.org/files/2016/deepmind/BGJ174-AlphaGo.pdf.
37. Sam Byford, “AlphaGo Retires from Competitive Go after Defeating World Number One 3-0,” Verge, May 27, 2017, https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/27/15704088/alphago-ke-jie-game-3-result-retires-future.
38. David Silver et al., “Mastering the Game of Go Without Human Knowledge,” Nature 550 (October 19, 2017): 354–359, https://deepmind.com/documents/119/agz_unformatted_nature.pdf.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. This statement was made by Zero’s lead programmer, David Silver, at a news conference.
42. Byford, “AlphaGo Retires From Competitive Go.”
43. Jordan Novet, “Google Is Finding Ways to Make Money from Alphabet’s DeepMind AI Technology,” CNBC, March 31, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/31/how-google-makes-money-from-alphabets-deepmind-ai-research-group.html.
44. Roydon Cerejo, “Google Duplex: Understanding the Core Technology Behind Assistant’s Phone Calls,” Gadgets 360, May 10, 2018, https://gadgets.ndtv.com/apps/features/google-duplex-google-io-ai-google-assistant-1850326.
45. Quoc Le and Barret Zoph, “Using Machine Learning to Explore Neural Network Architecture,” Google AI (blog), May 17, 2017, https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/05/using-machine-learning-to-explore.html.
46. The Winograd schema, proposed by Canadian computer scientist Hector Levesque in 2011, presents an alternative to the Turing test to measure the capabilities of an AI and was named for Stanford computer scientist Terry Winograd. Focusing on beating humans in direct competition has led to neglecting other ways of measuring and advancing AI. The Winograd schema was intended as a more multidimensional test because passing it requires more than a broad data set. Ernest Davis, Leora Morgenstern, and Charles Ortiz, three computer scientists at NYU, proposed the Winograd Schema Challenge, which is run once a year. They offer a terrific example on their faculty website (last accessed September 5, 2018, https://cs.nyu.edu/faculty/davise/papers/WinogradSchemas/WS.html):
The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they [feared/advocated] violence. If the word is “feared,” then “they” refers to the city council; if it is “advocated,” then “they” presumably refers to the demonstrators.
In his paper, Levesque said that Winograd schemas should satisfy the following constraints:
• Easily disambiguated by the human reader (ideally, so easily that the reader does not even notice that there is an ambiguity).
• Not solvable by simple techniques such as selectional restrictions.
• Google-proof; that is, there is no obvious statistical test over text corpora that will reliably disambiguate these correctly.
CHAPTER 2: THE INSULAR WORLD OF AI’S TRIBES
1. Mike Isaac and Sheera Frenkel, “Facebook Security Breach Exposes Accounts of 50 Million Users,” New York Times, September 28, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/technology/facebook-hack-data-breach.html.
2. Casey Newton, “Facebook Portal’s Claims to Protect User Privacy Are Falling Apart, The Verge, October 17, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17986992/facebook-portal-privacy-claims-ad-targeting.
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sp; 3. “AMA: We Are the Google Brain Team. We’d Love to Answer Your Questions about Machine Learning,” Reddit, August 4, 2016, https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/4w6tsv/ama_we_are_the_google_brain_team_wed_love_to/.
4. Ibid.
5. “Diversity,” Google, https://diversity.google/.
6. Nitasha Tiku, “Google’s Diversity Stats Are Still Very Dismal,” Wired, August 14, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/googles-employee-diversity-numbers-havent-really-improved/.
7. Daisuke Wakabayashi and Katie Benner, “How Google Protected Andy Rubin, the ‘Father of Android,’” New York Times, October 25, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-harassment-andy-rubin.html.
8. David Broockman, Greg F. Ferenstein, and Neil Malhotra, “The Political Behavior of Wealthy Americans: Evidence from Technology Entrepreneurs,” Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Working Paper No. 3581, December 9, 2017, https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers/political-behavior-wealthy-americans-evidence-technology.
9. “ICYMI: RNC Chairwoman and Brad Parscale Demand Answers from Facebook and Twitter,” Republican National Committee, May 24, 2018, https://www.gop.com/icymi-rnc-chairwoman-brad-parscale-demand-answers-from-facebook-twitter.
10. Kate Conger and Sheera Frenkel, “Dozens at Facebook Unite to Challenge Its ‘Intolerant’ Liberal Culture,” New York Times, August 28, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/28/technology/inside-facebook-employees-political-bias.html.
11. Veronica Rocha, “Crime-Fighting Robot Hits, Rolls over Child at Silicon Valley Mall,” Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2016, http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-crimefighting-robot-hurts-child-bay-area-20160713-snap-story.html.
12. Julian Benson, “Elite’s AI Created Super Weapons and Started Hunting Players. Skynet Is Here,” Kotaku, June 3, 2016, http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2016/06/03/elites-ai-created-super-weapons-and-started-hunting-players-skynet-is-here.
13. Joseph P. Boon, “Bob Hope Predicts Greater US,” Bucks County Courier Times, Aug 20, 1974, https://newspaperarchive.com/bucks-county-courier-times-aug-20-1974-p-9/.
14. James McPherson, “The New Comic Style of Richard Pryor,” New York Times, April 27, 1975. This is a great story on Pryor before he was famous.
15. Ashlee Vance, “How We Got Here,” Bloomberg Businessweek, May 21, 2018, https://www.scribd.com/article/379513106/How-We-Got-Here.
16. “Computer Science,” Stanford Bulletin 2018–19, Stanford University, https://exploredegrees.stanford.edu/schoolofengineering/computerscience/#bachelortext.
17. “Vector Representations of Words,” TensorFlow.org, https://www.tensorflow.org/tutorials/representation/word2vec.
18. Tolga Bolukbasi et al., “Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings,” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29 (2016): 4349–4357, https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.06520.
19. Natalie Saltiel, “The Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence,” MIT Media Lab, November 16, 2017, https://www.media.mit.edu/courses/the-ethics-and-governance-of-artificial-intelligence/. You can watch the lectures here.
20. You can watch the lectures here: https://www.media.mit.edu/courses/the-ethics-and-governance-of-artificial-intelligence/.
21. Catherine Ashcraft, Brad McLain, and Elizabeth Eger, Women in Tech: The Facts (Boulder, CO: National Center for Women & Information Technology, 2016), https://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/womenintech_facts_fullreport_05132016.pdf.
22. “Degrees in computer and information sciences conferred by degree-granting institutions, by level of degree and sex of student: 1970–71 through 2010–11,” Table 349 in Digest of Education Statistics, 2012 (Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, 2013), https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp.
23. “Doctor’s degrees conferred by postsecondary institutions, by race/ethnicity and field of study: 2013–14 and 2014–15,” Table 324.25 in Digest of Education Statistics, 2016 (Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, 2018), https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_324.25.asp?current=yes.
24. Christopher Mims, “What the Google Controversy Misses: The Business Case for Diversity,” Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-the-google-controversy-misses-the-business-case-for-diversity-1502625603.
25. Jessi Hempel, “Melinda Gates and Fei-Fei Li Want to Liberate AI from ‘Guys With Hoodies,’” Wired, May 4, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/05/melinda-gates-and-fei-fei-li-want-to-liberate-ai-from-guys-with-hoodies/.
26. Meng Jing, “China Looks to School Kids to Win the Global AI Race,” South China Morning Post, International Edition, May 3, 2018, https://www.scmp.com/tech/china-tech/article/2144396/china-looks-school-kids-win-global-ai-race.
27. “China Launches First University Program to Train Intl AI Talents,” Zhongguancun Science Park, April 4, 2018, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/m/beijing/zhongguancun/2018-04/04/content_35979394.htm.
28. David Barboza, “The Rise of Baidu (That’s Chinese for Google),” New York Times, September 17, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/business/yourmoney/17baidu.html.
29. “Rise of China’s Big Tech in AI: What Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent Are Working On,” CBInsights.com, April 26, 2018, https://www.cbinsights.com/research/china-baidu-alibaba-tencent-artificial-intelligence-dominance/.
30. Louise Lucas, “The Chinese Communist Party Entangles Big Tech,” Financial Times, July 18, 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/5d0af3c4-846c-11e8-a29d-73e3d454535d.
31. Javier C. Hernandez, “A Hong Kong Newspaper on a Mission to Promote China’s Soft Power,” New York Times, March 31, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/31/world/asia/south-china-morning-post-hong-kong-alibaba.html.
32. Paul Farhi, “Washington Post Closes Sale to Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos,” Washington Post, October 1, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/washington-post-closes-sale-to-amazon-founder-jeff-bezos/2013/10/01/fca3b16a-2acf-11e3-97a3-ff2758228523_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.3d04830eab75.
33. Jason Lim, “WeChat Is Being Trialled To Make Hospitals More Efficient In China,” Forbes, June 16, 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jlim/2014/06/16/wechat-is-being-trialed-to-make-hospitals-more-efficient-in-china/#63a2dd3155e2.
34. “Rise of China’s Big Tech in AI.”
35. Arjun Kharpal, “China’s Tencent Surpasses Facebook in Valuation a Day after Breaking $500 Billion Barrier,” CNBC, November 21, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/21/tencent-surpasses-facebook-in-valuation.html.
36. Sam Rutherford, “5 Things to Know About Tencent, the Chinese Internet Giant That’s Worth More than Facebook Now,” Gizmodo, November 27, 2017, https://gizmodo.com/5-things-to-know-about-tencent-the-chinese-internet-gi-1820767339.
37. Rebecca Fannin, “China Releases a Tech Dragon: The BAT,” Techonomy, May 23, 2018, https://techonomy.com/2018/05/china-releases-tech-dragon-bat/.
38. “Mobile Fact Sheet,” Pew Research Center, February 5, 2018, http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/mobile/.
39. Kaya Yurieff, “Amazon’s Cyber Monday Was Its Biggest Sales Day Ever,” CNN Money, November 29, 2017, https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/29/technology/amazon-cyber-monday/index.html.
40. Helen H. Wang, “Alibaba’s Singles’ Day by the Numbers: A Record $25 Billion Haul,” Forbes, November 12, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/helenwang/2017/11/12/alibabas-singles-day-by-the-numbers-a-record-25-billion-haul/#45dcfea1db15.
41. Fannin, “China Releases a Tech Dragon.”
42. Michael Brown and Pavneet Singh, China’s Technology Transfer Strategy (Silicon Valley: Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, 2017), https://new.reorg-research.com/data/documents/20170928/59ccf7de70c2f.pdf.
43. For the full text of the 13th FYP, see People’s Republic of China, 13th Five-Year Plan on National Economic and Social Development, March 17, 2016. Translation. http://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2016-03/17/content_5054992.htm.
> 44. J.P., “What Is China’s Belt and Road Initiative?,” Economist, May 15, 2017, https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2017/05/14/what-is-chinas-belt-and-road-initiative.
45. Salvatore Babones, “China’s Middle Class Is Pulling Up the Ladder Behind Itself,” Foreign Policy, February 1, 2018, https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/02/01/chinas-middle-class-is-pulling-up-the-ladder-behind-itself/.
46. Pew Research Center, The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, December 2015), http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing-ground/.
47. Emmie Martin, “70% of Americans Consider Themselves Middle Class—But Only 50% Are,” CNBC, June 30, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/30/70-percent-of-americans-consider-themselves-middle-class-but-only-50-percent-are.html.
48. Abha Bhattarai, “China Asked Marriott to Shut Down Its Website. The Company Complied,” Washington Post, January 18, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/01/18/china-demanded-marriott-change-its-website-the-company-complied.
49. Louis Jacobson, “Yes, Donald Trump Did Call Climate Change a Chinese Hoax,” PolitiFact, June 3, 2016, https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jun/03/hillary-clinton/yes-donald-trump-did-call-climate-change-chinese-h/.
50. Michael Greenstone, “Four Years After Declaring War on Pollution, China Is Winning,” New York Times, March 12, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/upshot/china-pollution-environment-longer-lives.html.
51. Carl Gene Fordham, “20 Actually Useful Chengyu,” CarlGene.com (blog), August 14, 2008, http://carlgene.com/blog/2010/07/20-actually-useful-chengyu.
52. Stephen Chen, “China Takes Surveillance to New Heights with Flock of Robotic Doves, but Do They Come in Peace?,” South China Morning Post, June 24, 2018, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2152027/china-takes-surveillance-new-heights-flock-robotic-doves-do-they.
53. Phil Stewart, “China Racing for AI Military Edge over US: Report,” Reuters, November 27, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-ai/china-racing-for-ai-military-edge-over-u-s-report-idUSKBN1DS0G5.