Artificial intelligence father - John McCarthy

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American computer and cognitive scientist, John McCarthy, is one of the co-authors of the paper that coined the term “artificial intelligence” for the first time, and developed the Lisp family of programming languages, and influenced the design of the ALGOL programming language.
 
Follow along in this video where we will learn more about the so-called father of artificial intelligence. Who was he and what did he accomplish? Before we continue, remember to hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss out on more interesting videos regarding AI, digital technology, and tech giants. Let’s go!
 
John McCarthy, born in Boston Massachusetts, on September 4th 1927, with Irish and Lithuanian ancestry. During the Great Depression, McCarthy’s family had some tough years and moved around a lot when he was younger, but eventually his father managed to find work in Los Angeles California, and finally the family was able to settle down and build a life. McCarthy’s parents were good at encouraging their son to think critically, which led to the young McCarthy reading a lot of books and becoming very interested in science. One of his favorite books was a Russian popular science book for children, called 100,000 Why's
 
John McCarthy also showed great skills in mathematics, and already as a teenager, he studied college mathematics by borrowing the textbooks on the subject from his local library. It certainly paid off, leading to McCarthy being able to skip 2 years of math, when he enrolled at the California Institute of Technology. However, McCarthy was suspended after he refused to participate in the school’s PE classes, but thanks to his later service in the US Army, McCarthy eventually got the final grades he needed to graduate. But it wasn’t until he attended a lecture by John von Neumann, that McCarthy became inspired for what would lead to his future works and endeavors.
 
Jon McCarthy received his doctorate in mathematics from Princeton University in 1951. Four years later, in 1955, he became an assistant professor at Dartmouth, and in 1956, he moved on to become a researcher at MIT. Six years later, in 1962, McCarthy started working as a professor at Stanford University, where he remained until his retirement, in the year of 2000.
 
John McCarthy was the man who invented logic to achieve common sense in artificial intelligence, and perhaps it is his work that is the basis for us human beings to be able to coexist with the soon-to-come, superintelligence.
 
When talking about artificial intelligence, the "founding fathers" that are mentioned, in addition to John McCarthy, are Alan Turing, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and Herbert A. Simon.
 
Together with Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude E. Shannon, John McCarthy actually coined the term “AI”, in a proposal they wrote for the famous Dartmouth conference in 1956, after which AI also began as a field of research.
 
From the late 1950s, McCarthy developed the Lisp programming language, which became the language used in AI applications. He also became involved in developing international standards in programming and informatics. Around 1959, McCarthy invented a kind of automatic memory management method, called “garbage collection methods”.
 
John McCarthy helped motivate the creation of Project MAC at MIT while working there, and at Stanford University he helped establish the Stanford AI Laboratory, which was a friendly rival to Project MAC for many years.
 
John McCarthy was also very involved in the creation of three of the earliest time-sharing systems: Compatible Time-Sharing System, BBN Time-Sharing System, and Dartmouth Time-Sharing System. His colleague, Lester Earnest, told the Los Angeles Times the following


"The Internet wouldn't have happened as soon as it did except for the fact that John McCarthy initiated the development of time-sharing systems. We keep inventing new names for time-sharing. It came to be called servers... Now we call it cloud computing. It's still just time-sharing as McCarthy started it.”
 

 
In 1961, John McCarthy was perhaps the first to publicly propose the idea of utility computing, in a speech given to celebrate MIT's centennial: that time-sharing computing technology could result in a future where computing power, and even specific applications, could be sold through the business model of public utilities, such as water or electricity. This idea of a computer or information tool was very popular during the late 1960s, but had faded by the mid-1990s. Since the beginning of the 21st Century, the idea has resurfaced in new forms.

To wrap it up, here are few lines McCarthy wrote in his 1979 paper, called, "Attributing Mental Properties to Machines"
 
 
"Machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs, and having beliefs seems to be a property of most machines capable of problem-free performance.”.