Talking to Machines: LISP and the Origins of A.I.

Creating a machine that thinks may have seemed like science
fiction in the 1950s. But John McCarthy decided to make it a
reality. And he started with a language he called LISP. Colin
Garvey describes how McCarthy created the first language for AI.
Sam Williams covers how early interest in thinking machines
spread from academia to the business world, and how—after certain
projects didn’t deliver on their promises—a long AI winter
eventually set in. Ulrich Drepper explains that the dreams of AI
went beyond what the hardware could deliver at the time.


But hardware gets more powerful each and every day. Chris
Nicholson points out that today’s machines have enough processing
power to handle the resource requirements of AI—so much so that
we’re in the middle of a revolutionary resurgence in AI research
and development. Finally, Rachel Thomas identifies the languages
of AI beyond LISP—evidence of the different kinds of tasks AI is
now being prepared to do.


If you want to dive deeper into LISP and the origins of
artificial intelligence, you can check out all our bonus material
over at redhat.com/commandlineheroes. You’ll find extra content
for every episode.


Follow along with the episode transcript.