John McCarthy (1927-2011) on Artificial Intelligence

This video features an interesting interview with the late Dr. John McCarthy – one of the fathers of artificial intelligence and inventor of LISP, one of the major languages used for programming AI. Here he discusses the history of artificial intelligence and the future role which non-monotonic reasoning will play in enabling computers to simulate the human mind.

Other topics discussed are: the biological and computer science approaches to AI; consciousness and cognition; why a machine isn’t just the sum of its parts; computers, chess and mathematical logic…

My favourite quote from the interview: “If it takes 200 years to achieve artificial intelligence, and then finally there is a textbook that explains how its done, the hardest part of that textbook to write will be the part that explains why people didn’t think of it 200 years ago…”