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. It was far from the awe-inspiring concept it has become. But the thawing of the so-called AI winter was starting.

On that day in 2004, I stared at an old thermostat in the room, and my conversation with John McCarthy moved from the inability of relational databases to be introspective to AI. The thermostat was the boring kind found in every university and hospital. John, however, believed that thermostats could “think” and “have emotions” and “beliefs”, as described in his essay found at http://stanford.io/2alWwVr. He was disappointed at the state of the affairs of AI—or databases, for that matter. I don’t know if the founders of Nest know of or were motivated by his thinking on thermostats when they invented their beautiful device, but every time I look at a Nest, I remember John McCarthy and how quickly ...