"I started my work in artificial intelligence in about '56, although I became really interested in it before that, in '49, when I was a beginning graduate student in mathematics," said McCarthy during an interview for the book, Thinking Allowed, Conversations On the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery, with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove, which was published in 1995. "I would say that the field has made somewhat less progress than I hoped, although I didn't have any definite opinion as to how fast it would progress. I think that it had and still has difficult conceptual problems to solve before we can get computer programs that are as intelligent as humans."

McCarthy also said one of the hardest things about AI is giving machines a self-awareness of their part in the world.

"One part of the problem is to develop language in which we can express for our computer programs the facts and reasoning about the common-sense world that humans have, and that is necessary in order to behave intelligently," he added. "A machine isn't the sum of its parts. If somebody took a car apart and gave you a heap of the parts, that wouldn't be a car. They have to be connected in a specified way and interacting in a specified way, and so if you want to say that the mind is a structure composed of parts interacting in a specialized way, I would agree with that, but it isn't just a heap of them."

McCarthy was the 1988 recipient of the Kyoto Prize, considered the Japanese equivalent of the Nobel Prize, for lifetime contributions to computer science and artificial intelligence.

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at or subscribe to . Her e-mail address is .