Pamela Ann McCorduck was a British-born American author of books about the history and philosophical significance of artificial intelligence, the future of engineering, and the role of women and technology.
23 Facts About Pamela McCorduck
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Pamela McCorduck contributed to Omni, The New York Times, Daedalus, and the Michigan Quarterly Review, and was a contributing editor of Wired.
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Pamela McCorduck was a former vice president of the PEN American Center.
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Pamela McCorduck was married to computer scientist and academic Joseph F Traub.
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Pamela McCorduck's mother was a beautician and teacher, while her father owned beauty colleges, including the one where her mother taught.
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Pamela McCorduck was the eldest of three siblings, with the younger two being twins.
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Pamela McCorduck moved to Stamford, Connecticut, in the United States, with her family, when she was 6.
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Pamela McCorduck lived in Rutherford, New Jersey, where she graduated from Rutherford High School before moving west and earning a bachelor's degree in English literature from University of California, Berkeley, in 1960.
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Pamela McCorduck stayed on as an executive assistant to Feigenbaum as he moved to Stanford University to set up the university's computer science department in 1965.
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Pamela McCorduck moved to Seattle, with her husband Joseph F Traub, whom she had met in Stanford, when he moved to the University of Washington; she later moved to Pittsburgh, where she taught at Carnegie Mellon University.
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Pamela McCorduck continued to interact with the scientists and researchers, including Raj Reddy and Allen Newell, many of whom she interviewed.
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Pamela McCorduck wrote about researchers who were studying expert systems, robotics, problem solving, general game playing, and speech recognition, becoming one of the pre-eminent writers on the topic who were able to explain the topics to a broad audience.
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Pamela McCorduck moved to Columbia University in 1979, teaching creative writing, when her husband Traub was appointed the first chairman of the computer science department at Columbia.
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Pamela McCorduck continued to write on artificial intelligence and related topics, including books such as The Universal Machine, The Rise of the Expert Company, and Aaron's Code.
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Pamela McCorduck wrote two novels, The Edge of Chaos and Bounded Rationality.
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Pamela McCorduck's last book was a memoir, This Could Be Important: My Life and Times With the Artificial Intelligentsia, in which she regretted not calling attention to the potential misuse of artificial intelligence earlier.
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Pamela McCorduck served as a board member and later as the vice president of the PEN American Center.
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Pamela McCorduck was chairperson of a committee that studied the long-range reorganization of the PEN America.
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Pamela McCorduck was a contributor to Omni, The New York Times, Daedalus, Michigan Quarterly Review and was a contributing editor of Wired.
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The Carnegie Mellon University library hosts the Traub-Pamela McCorduck collection set up in 2018, based on her contributions, which included early counting machines, manuscripts, books and artifacts documenting the history of computing, including two enigma machines.
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Pamela McCorduck moved to California after her husband's death in 2015.
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Pamela McCorduck died on October 18,2021, at her Walnut Creek, California, home, nine days before her 81st birthday.
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Pamela McCorduck was survived by her sister, Mrs Sandra Marona, and her brother, John McCorduck, as well as three nephews, four nieces and two step-daughters.