McCarthy's Elephant language proposal was mentioned here several times in the past. This talk from Etech provides a nice introduction to the fundamental idea behind Elephant and its background.

The talk includes interesting, though not entirely motivated, comments related to the paper Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines. This is one of McCarthy's most significant papers in my opinion, and deserves more attention and debate. It is also rather amusing. I hope I will find the time some day to put this paper in context (McCarthy's comments in the Etech talk notwithstanding), but for the time being I recommend it to anyone interested in this sort of thing.

One thing is for sure: We can safely add to the 2009 predictions the prediction that Elephant will not be ready in 2009...