John McCarthy

The ability to handle uncertainty and incomplete information is essential for real-world AI.

AI is not just about building intelligent agents, but about building intelligent environments.

The ultimate goal of AI is to create a world where intelligence is abundant and accessible to all.

All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection.

LISP is now the second oldest programming language in present widespread use.

The main requirement for intelligence is the ability to do the right thing when you don't know what to do.

As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore.

The advice 'Know thyself' is not good advice. It is better to know others.

The notion of 'consciousness' is so ill-defined that it's not useful for either psychology or computer science.

Time sharing is a method of computing in which several users, at different locations, share a central computer facility.

I think there's a world market for maybe five computers.

The chess machine is the drosophila of artificial intelligence.

We shall therefore say that a program has common sense if it automatically deduces for itself a sufficiently wide class of immediate consequences of anything it is told and what it already knows.

An ultimate goal is to make programs that learn from their experience as effectively as humans do.

The key problem of artificial intelligence is getting computers to do things which, if done by humans, would be said to involve intelligence.

LISP is a programmable programming language.

The biggest risk of artificial intelligence is that people give up too early.

To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.

The design of a programming language should be guided by the types of programs one wants to write.

Recursion is a fundamental idea in computer science and in the description of processes in general.