The New Artificial Intelligence Market

IN 2004, IN THE MAZE-LIKE aisles of Stanford's computer science department, I spoke to a man who resembled Santa Claus. This bearded man was John McCarthy, who coined the term Artificial Intelligence in the 1950s and was one of the founding fathers of Artificial Intelligence, along with Marvin Minsky. McCarthy spearheaded the effort for some time, including creating the language Lisp for the purpose of AI, among other innovations like time-sharing for computers, garbage collection, and lambda calculus. I was a graduate student studying natural language processing, and AI wasn't as cool as it is today. Neither was natural language processing.