 Pittsburgh in the 1970s was not a congenial place to be. I want to put this as accurately as possible. The steel industry was closing. Everybody, no, everybody didn't know that. Most people thought, this is just a hiccup. Steel will come back to what it once was. And everything will be fine. Well, that was not going to be. And those people with vision here, and I include the then-president of Carnegie Mellon, Richard Seyert, Herb Simon, a handful of other people said, we're going to do something different in Pittsburgh. We're going to green Pittsburgh. And in 1972, 73, this was a radical idea, very radical. Meanwhile, you could go through fine places in Pittsburgh and find slag heaps in the middle of the road, on vacant lots, because nobody thought they were worth removing. The warehouses, which are now full of high tech, they were left to rust because nobody thought it was worth tearing them down. It was, as I say, not a congenial place. And the promise of greening seemed to me to be so far away. I just didn't think I wanted to spend my life here. I think, well, I told you that I kept seeing this name in the business school, Herb Simon. I later compared it to, as if all English literature had been written by Dryden, somebody you've heard of, but nobody great. And when I finally, after those two years at Stanford, I really understood how great he was. So there's a big reception when Joe and I arrive here for welcoming the new chair and his wife. And there's Herb Simon. I am absolutely tongue-tied. Rockstar. Rockstar. Oh, fabulous. And slowly we got to know each other. Joe and I were living in an apartment on Fifth Avenue just by Wilkins. And we would have parties and I'd get to know him there. But we really didn't become very friendly until Joe and I bought a house, which is at the intersection of Forbes and Northumberland. And Herb would walk home every day along that street, because he lived on Northumberland but about two more miles up the street. And I would see his hat floating past the hedge. In the summertime he wore a black beret, and in the wintertime he wore a two, you know, these Peruvian things that come down over your ears and have a little tassel. But I'd see this, and I'd be putting my cover over my typewriter just then. And I would lean out the door and I'd say, Herb, would you like a sherry? And Herb almost always wanted a sherry, so he'd come in. And that's when we really got friendly with each other. And we had such a good time together. We just covered the waterfront. He was so interested in linguistics, so we talked about that. Of course we talked about artificial intelligence. We talked about music. We talked about art. Whatever we felt like talking about. And he was marvelously relaxed and funny. I think he looked so serious in all these pictures. If you listen to those tapes, Herb and I are laughing like hell all the way through them. Partly we were flirting with each other, no question, but also partly we just enjoyed laughing, both of us. And we saw the funny side of everything. Okay, so those were afternoons with Herb. They were wonderful, just wonderful. I didn't realize how often we met until I went back and looked at my journals. Herb was over. Herb was over. Herb was over. Oh my gosh. And there's a kind of footnote here. That is that Dorothea Simon and I never got past a certain coolness. And I thought it was my rather militant feminism, which it was very militant in the 70s. And then much later I realized, here was her husband stopping off at least once a week with a much younger woman to have a sherry. And these conversations were so cerebral. She had nothing to worry about, but I could understand and retrospect how it seemed, maybe a little questionable. And even Joe said when I told him how often Herb and I amazed. Really? I was on campus working. The conventional view of people who were doing this was that they were absolute nerds in the worst possible way. They were dreadful human beings. They were at their computer screens 24-7. They had no interest outside their computer screens, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm very sorry to say that a book called Weisenbaum's book, Something in Human Reason, stressed this and found a huge audience because this is just what people wanted to hear. Now, I was keeping company with people who had omnivorous appetites for the world. I should tell you about the Squirrel Hill Sages. At some point, Herb and I were... It may even be in his correspondence, I didn't save mine. Herb and I were discussing how our students had the most interesting conversations, the meaning of life and all that stuff. And we're stuck with conversations about the Xerox budget and can we add another course? And should this course be two semesters or one? Really dull stuff. And I said, how can this be? And I'm sure this was by correspondence. A U.S. post, by the way, because nobody had personal email. You very rarely had personal email. Herb said, you know, Dot and I used to have a little salon when we were at the University of Chicago on Sunday nights. And everybody knew it was serious. You didn't come in just to gossip. You came in to discuss a topic of the day. You could do that. You could do that, meaning me. And I said, oh, Herb, that sounds wonderful. Okay, I will do it. And we decided that it should be a very small number I think there were eight of us. Alan Nuland, his wife, Herb Simon and Dorothea Simon. The novelist, Mark Harris and his wife, Josephine and Joe and I. And we met monthly. We decided the topic ahead of time. It was after dinner, so nobody had to run around being the host or anything like that. And privately, I call them the Squirrel Hill Sages because we all lived in Squirrel Hill. But they found out soon enough. They laughed. That was okay. We had some fabulous conversations. Just fabulous. You could imagine those eight in one room talking. It was just great. It was one of the high points of living in Pittsburgh. All of us had thrown work out into the world. Almost all of us had thrown work out into the world. And so we went around talking about criticism and how we felt about it and whose throats we'd like to strangle and things like that. And Herb made a little speech. And the speech was this. There are two kinds of criticism. There is the criticism that tries to understand what you're doing and gives you the benefit of the doubt because you have put effort into it even if the critic doesn't agree or understand. It's a good faith exploration of your work. And then there's the kind of criticism that is put on by people who have an agenda and you just happen to be the meat that's going through the meat grinder for that agenda. And we all knew exactly what he meant because we'd all been through it. Mark with all of his novels, me with my various books by that time, Joe with his scientific work, on and on. So I said, it's getting pretty late at this hour, and I said to Herb, who do you write for? And he said, oh. I said, no, come on, tell me, who do you write for? And he says, oh, come on, I coaxed. He said, well, they're not all living. I said, oh, okay, name one. He said, well, Aristotle. He said it in such a way that you could laugh. And yet I thought, yeah, there's some truth there. So then I began the interview process and I was reading, of course, all the time because one of the things I, for a long time, taught students to write about science. One of the things I insisted they do is read the papers of the people that they were interviewing. And so I was reading Newell's papers. I was reading Simon's papers. I was reading the papers of everybody I interviewed. It was so hard for me. I was an English major. What did I know? And there were times parts of that book were written through a veil of tears because it was so hard for me. I will never do this. I will never be able to do this right. And yet, somehow I did it. Somehow I did it. And I think I said earlier to other people on campus this morning, I didn't want to ask these guys what their papers meant. I really wanted to go in prepared. And it would take absolute desperation for me to say, Herb, I didn't understand what you meant by, but there were times when I had to say that, and Herb was a natural teacher. Pamela, this is another way of looking at it. Allen was a natural teacher. Pamela, look at it this way and so on. Oh, they were fabulous. And Ed Feige, I was a lot less shy about calling Ed Feige. And Pamela said, what's this? And he would explain to me, I had wonderful mentors, wonderful mentors. Just to this day, I am so grateful. And as I think I said earlier, these guys were at the peak of their research careers. And I know what, how demanding research is. And they would take time out for an hour, an hour and a half to answer my innocent, stupid, sometimes knowledgeable questions with complete grace. It was just a gift, a gift. One night, I was sitting with Harold Cohen, the painter, and we had had a glass of wine or two. And he said, Pamela, why were you drawn to artificial intelligence? And I gave him the usual, you know, the most interesting people I know were doing it, which was true. And my smartest people I knew were doing it. What an exceptional thing it is going to be if it works. And we think it's going, it feels a lot more like it's going to work now than it did 20 years ago. And then something popped out of me, which was totally unconscious. And that was, and I think it will put an end to the masculine hegemony in intelligence generally. I thought, did that come out of my mouth? Yeah, it did. And yeah, it was true. And oh, I was wrong. But I didn't know that at the time because we still had hopes that this, the machine would somehow be disinterested in a way that humans are not disinterested. And that is my great disappointment with AI right now, that it isn't making a more even playing field. Joe and I started collecting anti-computational instruments in the 80s. You know, kids were through college. We finally had some extra money. And Gwen Bell, who was then married to Gordon Bell, said to Joe, well, first of all, she took us through the small museum that she'd started near digital equipment. That later moved to Boston, became the Boston Computer Museum. And later still went out to Silicon Valley, which is the right place for it, I guess. Anyway, she said to Joe, hey, you know, you can pick this stuff up for a song. If you want to collect something, try this. And oh, oh, that was catnip to Joe. And he began seeing what we could collect. And we never paid much money for these things. We got them at flea markets. We got them from dealers in scientific instruments. We got them, Joe was in a network, a very informal network of people who knew and were keeping track of who had enigma machines in private hands. And every once in a while we'd hear somebody was ready to turn one into cash. And so we bought the three-rotor enigma first. And then he lusted for a four-rotor enigma and he got that through this network. And as I remember, we went to London and, no, that was another machine. He was in touch with this man. We sent a check. It was probably the most expensive machine we bought. $10,000, which now, of course, there are hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction. But that was rich enough for our blood. And that was the pièce de résistance. And we got other things, too, but mostly we just picked them up cheap. I can remember being out in an orchard. We'd gone to one of these U-pick apricot orchards and I walked in to pay for the apricots we were getting and I saw this old calculator and I said, oh, that's cute. Would you think of selling it? They kind of looked at each other and they said, well, it doesn't work. It works, but it's not very fast. They had an electronic one. I said, oh, well, it's kind of cute. What would you consider? And they said, well, 50 bucks. And I said, 30. And we settled at 40. And that was typical. We'd just buy things on the spur of the moment. And nobody had any idea that these had any value. It was just this tiny coterie of collectors. Because England could not produce enough food to feed the population, for years it had been relying on food coming in from elsewhere. And when I was born, those shipments had been curtailed tremendously. And I was close to starving to death. My mother didn't have enough milk for me because she wasn't getting enough food. And unbeknownst to us, Alan Turing down there in Bletchley Park was figuring out where the U-boats were and how to bring convoys of food into the United Kingdom so that we wouldn't starve to death. And so I have a very personal connection with the enigma machines. I am, is the word proud, grateful that I've had this long connection with artificial intelligence. It has been a splendid, shaping gift for my life. What an opportunity to be in on the ground floor. I mean, how lucky can you get? So I'm also grateful for my luck. I'm grateful for having had a very happy marriage to one of the greats in the field and just having a wail of a good time the whole time. I'm grateful to have been in on the ground floor, but I'm really envious that I'm not going to get to see it go on because immortality is a fact. So just, what fun I've had, what fun I've had.