Pamela McCorduck

Pamela Ann McCorduck was born in Liverpool, England, on October 27, 1940.⁠[1]

She came to the United States at six and later settled on the West Coast; after finishing high school at 15 she earned a bachelor’s degree in English at the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry.⁠[2]

In the 1960s she worked alongside Edward Feigenbaum at Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry, which began her encounters with computer scientists.⁠[3]

In 1970 she earned a master’s degree in English literature from Columbia UniversityColumbia UniversityColumbia University, formally Columbia University in the City of New York, is a private research university in New York City and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1754 by royal charter from King George II as King's College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in New York State and the fifth oldest in the United States. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 and adopted the university name and moved to Manhattan's Morningside Heights in 1896. It has 17 schools and four affiliated colleges, with 35,978 students enrolled in fall 2025. Legal scholar Jennifer L. Mnookin became president on July 1, 2026.Open the full entry.⁠[1]

In 1971 her husband, the computer scientist Joseph F. Traub, became head of the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It grew out of the Carnegie Technical Schools, founded with funding from Andrew Carnegie in 1900, which were renamed the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and took the present name after merging with the Mellon Institute in 1967. The university is known for computer science, robotics, engineering, and the arts, and has campuses in Qatar, Silicon Valley, and Rwanda. As of September 2025, it enrolled 16,582 students. Its current president is Farnam Jahanian. On September 30, 2026, the university announced a $3 billion gift from Ken Griffin and plans to build a new campus in Miami.Open the full entry, which grew under him from fewer than ten professors to fifty.⁠[4]

After Traub took up his post at CMU, she taught English literature at the University of Pittsburgh, where she witnessed the birth and growth of artificial intelligence, which became a focus of her writing.⁠[2]

In 1978 she donated the transcripts and research from her oral history interviews for Machines Who Think to the CMU University Archives.⁠[3]

In 1979 W. H. Freeman in San Francisco published her Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence, 375 pages with a bibliography.⁠[5]

In 1979 Columbia University invited Traub to found its computer science department; she too went on to teach at Columbia, where she taught science writing.⁠[4]

In 1983 Addison-Wesley published The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan’s Computer Challenge to the World, which she co-wrote with Edward A. Feigenbaum; the book ran to 288 pages.⁠[6]

The book described Japan’s plan to build “fifth generation” computers capable of intelligent reasoning and urged the United States to respond more vigorously; the authors held that the U.S. had a two- to three-year lead in the technology but warned that “we are squandering our lead at the rate of one day per day.”⁠[6]

On September 23, 1985, McGraw-Hill published her The Universal Machine, which likened the computer’s significance for the 20th century to that of the printing press for the 15th and discussed the changes it brought through examples from sport, art and public policy to children learning computer skills in Senegal.⁠[7]

She wrote Aaron’s Code: MetaMetaMeta (Meta Platforms, Inc.) is a publicly listed American technology company, renamed from Facebook in 2021, that operates social communication, digital advertising, virtual reality, smart glasses and artificial intelligence businesses.Open the full entry-Art, Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of Harold Cohen, about the artist Harold Cohen and his drawing program AARON. In April 1995 she remarked that AARON was consistent across all its drawings—“it has a personal style”—and called Cohen’s work aesthetically unique.⁠[8]

On June 1, 1996, Addison-Wesley published The Futures of Women, which she co-wrote with Nancy Ramsey; both were then members of Global Business Network, a scenario-planning organization, and the book sketched four scenarios for women’s lives worldwide over the following 20 years.⁠[9]

CNNCNNCNN (Cable News Network) is an Atlanta-based news organization founded by Ted Turner on June 1, 1980, as the world’s first 24-hour television news channel. It has been owned in turn by Turner Broadcasting System, Time Warner, AT&T and Warner Bros. Discovery, became part of Skydance Corporation along with Warner Bros. Discovery in October 2026, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry based a two-part documentary on the book. With Ramsey she also co-wrote a study of women in information technology for the National Science Foundation, served on a panel advising the National Academy of Engineering, and consulted for firms in the high-technology, financial and transportation sectors.⁠[10]

In December 2003 AI Magazine published an article by Philip Mirowski revisiting Machines Who Think and the origins of AI some 25 years after the book appeared.⁠[11]

In 2004 A K Peters of Natick, Massachusetts, issued a 25th anniversary update of Machines Who Think; AI & Society published Richard Ennals’s review of the edition the same year.⁠[12]

On April 16, 2004, she appeared on KQED’s Forum programme to discuss artificial intelligence with host Angie Coiro.⁠[13]

On February 15, 2008, the Inkwell forum of the online community The WELL began a conversation with her about The Edge of Chaos, which the hosts described as her return to fiction after many years of nonfiction, noting that she had been a contributing editor to Wired.⁠[14]

She recalled encountering the sciences of complexity as a guest at the Santa Fe Institute in the summer and fall of 1991, and later trying to embody principles of complexity in this novel.⁠[14]

On June 1, 2012, Sunstone Press published Bounded Rationality, her novel set in Santa Fe, at 408 pages; its author note said she had been a board member and officer of the American PEN Center and an officer of the New Mexico Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.⁠[15]

Answering Edge.org’s 2015 annual question, “What do you think about machines that think?”, she wrote that after more than fifty years of watching public opinion about AI, the extremes had given way to an acknowledgment that AI is an epochal scientific, technological and social event, and that if handled wisely it could bring immense benefits from the planetary to the personal.⁠[16]

Joseph Traub died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on August 24, 2015, at the age of 83.⁠[4]

On February 27, 2018, CMU announced her gift of the Traub-McCorduck Collection to the University Libraries: more than 50 calculating machines, letters and books, including one four-rotor and one three-rotor Enigma machine, a Thomas Arithmometer, a Curta calculator and rare books by Charles Babbage.⁠[17]

On April 19, 2018, she recorded an oral history interview with the CMU Libraries, discussing her friendship with Herbert Simon and Allen Newell, life in Pittsburgh, her writing and her collecting of computer artifacts such as Enigma machines.⁠[18]

On August 23, 2019, she appeared on Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry’s podcast, discussing the history and philosophical significance of artificial intelligence, Machines Who Think and The Fifth Generation, and her time with founding figures of AI from the 1956 Dartmouth summer workshop.⁠[19]

Her memoir This Could Be Important: My Life and Times with the Artificial Intelligentsia, published by CMU’s ETC Press, combines memoir, social history and group biography in portraits of four founders of AI—Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy; on October 22, 2019, she discussed and signed the book in conversation with Raj Reddy at CMU’s Hunt Library.⁠[20]

She died at her home in Walnut Creek, California, on October 18, 2021.⁠[1]

She was 80. Edward Feigenbaum said she had continued to be a bridge between AI and the humanities.⁠[3]

University of Pittsburgh: Official website: https://www.pitt.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

Columbia University: Official website: https://www.columbia.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]