Skip to content

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.

— John McCarthy Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines (1979)

Another quote →

More quotes by John McCarthy

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.

All John McCarthy quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John McCarthy (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.