This son of an Irish emigrant invented Artificial Intelligence and changed the world

John McCarthy was the son of a penniless Irish immigrant from Kerry and maybe the most important Irish American you never heard of. He died in 2011 aged 84. He was an American computer scientist pioneer and inventor and is known as the father of artificial intelligence (AI) after playing the key role in the development of intelligent machines we now call computers. He won the Turing Prize, one step below the Nobel, in 1971. He coined the term artificial intelligence for a 1955 Dartmouth College conference he chiefly organized which was the first-ever AI conference.