PERSON
Raj Reddy
The Turing Award laureate who spent fifty years inside AI—making machines understand human speech, inventing the blackboard architecture that is now the foundation of multi-agent systems, and insisting, against the entire drift of the industry, that the measure of artificial intelligence is whether it reaches the two and a half billion people who cannot read.
Raj Reddy is one of the very few people alive who can be said to have watched artificial intelligence from the inside for the whole of its existence as a science, and that fact alone reorganizes how we read him. Born in 1937 in a village in Andhra Pradesh without electricity, trained first as a civil engineer because there was no computer science to train in, he encountered a paper by
John McCarthy as a young man and decided on the spot that this was what he wanted to work on. He went to Stanford, took his doctorate under McCarthy in 1966, and committed his life to AI at the precise moment when committing one’s life to AI looked like a category error. He spent the decades that followed making machines understand human speech—the problem he chose because it was the