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John McCarthy died on Monday. He coined the term "artificial intelligence", and created the programming language Lisp in 1958. The Stanford obituary has a good overview of his career; ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jwz's post has a nice little anecdote.
I had a very minor McCarthy encounter myself: I stood near him at a book reading at a bookstore in Palo Alto in the early '90s. I don't remember the author or book, but it was about how strong AI is impossible without embodiment. (It might have been Hubert Dreyfus, but I think it was someone younger/less established.) I don't remember if McCarthy had some question or comment, or if someone just pointed him out to me, but I remember later realizing that I had made some comment about Scheme to a friend while within earshot of the inventor of Lisp.
At some point I discovered his web pages about the sustainability of human progress, which are fascinating if sometimes seeming to veer into crackpottery. I hope Stanford keeps these pages up permanently, because I never made it all the way through their somewhat confusing organization, and I think McCarthy had continued to add to them until pretty recently.
One thing I was surprised to learn from his obituary is that he was married to Carolyn Talcott, whose name I know from programming language theory literature. In fact, she was on the PhD thesis committee of someone who was on my PhD thesis committee, so I guess, academically, she's my grandmother!
John McCarthy was also known as the Programming: You're Doing It Completely Wrong guy. Rest in peace.
jwz's post has a nice little anecdote.I had a very minor McCarthy encounter myself: I stood near him at a book reading at a bookstore in Palo Alto in the early '90s. I don't remember the author or book, but it was about how strong AI is impossible without embodiment. (It might have been Hubert Dreyfus, but I think it was someone younger/less established.) I don't remember if McCarthy had some question or comment, or if someone just pointed him out to me, but I remember later realizing that I had made some comment about Scheme to a friend while within earshot of the inventor of Lisp.
At some point I discovered his web pages about the sustainability of human progress, which are fascinating if sometimes seeming to veer into crackpottery. I hope Stanford keeps these pages up permanently, because I never made it all the way through their somewhat confusing organization, and I think McCarthy had continued to add to them until pretty recently.
One thing I was surprised to learn from his obituary is that he was married to Carolyn Talcott, whose name I know from programming language theory literature. In fact, she was on the PhD thesis committee of someone who was on my PhD thesis committee, so I guess, academically, she's my grandmother!
John McCarthy was also known as the Programming: You're Doing It Completely Wrong guy. Rest in peace.
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His argument about there being enough uranium and thorium in seawater to economically run reactors for the next four billion years is worth reading.
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