A.I.mpact, Part 1: Don't Wait for A.I., It's Already Here

John McCarthy once made a telling complaint that still applies to how people have perceived -- or, rather, failed to perceive -- the arrival of artificial intelligence in their lives: "As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore." He was more than qualified to carp about the fact, having won the Turing Award and being one of the founding fathers of AI. He even gets credited with coining the very term artificial intelligence back in 1956. Here's how what John McCarthy said relates to what's going on today: Innovations like AI often sneak in on us, gradually merging into the workaday and commonplace. They do it without any of the abrupt upheavals or manic melodramatics we've been conditioned to expect of AI by TV, the movies and (bad) science fiction.