One way our society likes to honor extraordinary people from the past, is to constantly bring up their memory and their contribution to society. The more we mention their name and what legacy they left behind, the more their story and memory will continue to live on for future generations.
Try it. When you think of who the father is of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud is the clear winner. The father of American psychology? William James. The fathers of the airplane? Wright brothers, hands down. Father of English poetry? Geoffrey Chaucer beats all the rest. When it comes to who the father is of artificial intelligence, we honor the late John McCarthy for that one.
In 1956, John McCarthy helped to organize the infamous Dartmouth Conference. The conference consisted of an eight-week workshop that gathered leading scientists to explore the ideas that machines could simulate intelligence. This exploration laid the groundwork for early artificial intelligence—the very intelligence that our world just exploded with using now.
The artificial intelligence groundwork and research that John McCarthy and various other leading scientists started exploring back in the 1950s, has contributed to the benefits that artificial intelligence can give our world today. This especially includes the meaningful and important living legacy platform that Miles Spencer and Adam Drake created by founding Reflekta.
If you look back in history, you can always find a bread crumb trail from when one great mind contributed something extraordinary to society, but simply ran out of time due to one’s lifespan, to where the next extraordinary mind continued that very same bread crumb trail for the next generation of great minds to continue the work. In this case, the late John McCarthy helped to start this great foundational research of artificial intelligence, and now Miles Spencer and Adam Drake are continuing this work in the artificial intelligence field to provide a living legacy platform for families everywhere. By creating Reflekta, we honor the late John McCarthy’s work, and push onward to contribute to the field, while also paving the way for the next generation to continue the bread crumb trail.