In 1956, one mathematician asked a question that sounded like science fiction at the time:
“What if a machine could think?”
That question gave birth to the term Artificial Intelligence.
That man was John McCarthy.
And that moment quietly started the AI story we are living inside today.
McCarthy did not build startups or pitch investors. He did something riskier. He defined ideas decades ahead of their time.
🔸 He argued that intelligence is not magic or “human essence”, but a formal system that can be described with logic
🔸 He created Lisp, the language used for AI long before Python or neural networks
🔸 He believed real AI should reason, set goals, and draw conclusions, not just predict the next token
When we talk today about AI agents, reasoning models, or autonomous decision systems, we are mostly catching up to ideas outlined 60 to 70 years ago.
The irony is that McCarthy was a skeptic. He did not believe in black-box magic and would likely be very strict with modern LLMs.
But his focus on logic, goals, and agency is exactly what is becoming relevant again.