Home › Authors › John McCarthy
John McCarthy Quotes
1927–2011 United States
John McCarthy (September 4, 1927 – October 24, 2011) was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist who received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). He was responsible for the coining of the term "Artificial Intelligence" in his 1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference and was the inventor of the Lisp programming language.
United States Academics Computer scientists Designers Scientists Also known as: John McCarthy
Random John McCarthy quote
8 quotes
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
One can even conjecture that Lisp owes its survival specifically to the fact that its programs are lists, which everyone, including me, has regarded as a disadvantage.
Comparing oneself with Galileo or Einstein is certainly good for the ego — provided one refrains from going into too much detail.
When there's a will to fail, obstacles can be found.
John McCarthy (1983)
An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can't be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question.
Whenever we write an axiom, a critic can say that the axiom is true only in a certain context. With a little ingenuity the critic can usually devise a more general context in which the precise form of the axiom doesn't hold. [...] There simply isn't a most general context.
When we program a computer to make choices intelligently after determining its options, examining their consequences, and deciding which is most favorable or most moral or whatever, we must program it to take an attitude towards its freedom of choice essentially isomorphic to that which a human must take to his own.
Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines (1979)
Program designers have a tendency to think of the users as idiots who need to be controlled. They should rather think of their program as a servant, whose master, the user, should be able to control it. If designers and programmers think about the apparent mental qualities that their programs will have, they'll create programs that are easier and pleasanter — more humane — to deal with.
Topics John McCarthy is quoted on
Works