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 visio ...