In this episode of pplpod, we explore the life and legacy of John McCarthy, the towering figure in computer science who coined the term "Artificial Intelligence" and helped found the field in the 1950s. Often referred to as "Uncle John" by his students, McCarthy’s work laid the groundwork for much of the technology we use today, from programming languages to the internet itself.

Key topics in this episode:

• Defining a Discipline: How McCarthy co-authored the proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth workshop that officially launched AI as a field of research.
• The Language of AI: The invention of Lisp, the second-oldest high-level programming language, and the creation of "garbage collection" for automatic memory management.
• Before the Cloud: McCarthy’s visionary development of time-sharing systems, which he predicted would lead to computing power being sold like a utility—a concept we now know as cloud computing.
• Logic and Philosophy: A look at McCarthy's "AI optimism," his belief that human intelligence could be formalized into logic, and his famous debates regarding machine consciousness.
• A Complex Life: From his childhood as the son of Communist parents to his eventual shift to conservative Republicanism and his passion for mountaineering.

Join us to learn why this Turing Award winner and National Medal of Science recipient famously declared, "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense".