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After short-term appointments at Princeton, Stanford University, Dartmouth, and MIT, he became a full professor at Stanford in 1962, where he remained until his retirement at the end of 2000. By the end of his early days at MIT, he would already be affectionately referred to as "Uncle John".[3]
McCarthy championed mathematical logic for Artificial Intelligence. In 1958, he proposed the advice taker, which inspired later work on question-answering and logic programming. Around 1959, he invented garbage collection to solve problems in Lisp.[4][5] Based on the lambda calculus, Lisp rapidly became the programming language of choice for AI applications after its publication in 1960.[6] He helped to motivate the creation of Project MAC at MIT, but left MIT for Stanford University in 1962, where he helped set up the Stanford AI Laboratory, for many years a friendly rival to Project MAC.
In 1961, he was the first to publicly suggest (in a speech given to celebrate MIT's centennial) that computer time-sharing technology might lead to a future in which computing power and even specific applications could be sold through the utility business model (like water or electricity). This idea of a computer or information utility was very popular in the late 1960s, but faded by the mid-1970s as it became clear that the hardware, software and telecommunications technologies of the time were simply not ready. However, since 2000, the idea has resurfaced in new forms (see application service provider, grid computing, and cloud computing.)
From 1978 to 1986, McCarthy developed the circumscription method of non-monotonic reasoning.
In 1982 he appears to have originated the idea of the space fountain which was further examined by Roderick Hyde.[7]
McCarthy often commented on world affairs on the Usenet forums. Some of his ideas can be found in his sustainability web page,[8] which is "aimed at showing that human material progress is desirable and sustainable".
His 2001 short story The Robot and the Baby[9] lightheartedly explored the question of whether robots should have (or simulate having) emotions, and anticipated aspects of Internet culture and social networking that became more prominent in the ensuing decade.