Marvin Minsky
Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minskywas an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence, co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth9 August 1927
CountryUnited States of America
intelligent perfect diversity
What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle.
differences car needs
Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!
would-be television tvs
Imagine what it would be like if TV actually were good. It would be the end of everything we know.
science looks television
It would be as useless to perceive how things 'actually look' as it would be to watch the random dots on untuned television screens.
levels doe bigs
But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does what it is works but what it does when it's stuck.
quality compare turns
We turn to quantities when we can't compare the qualities of things.
couple powerful years
A couple of hundred years from now, maybe [science fiction writers] Isaac Asimov and Fred Pohl will be considered the important philosophers of the twentieth century, and the professional philosophers will almost all be forgotten, because they're just shallow and wrong, and their ideas aren't very powerful.
smart simple technique
This is a tricky domain because, unlike simple arithmetic, to solve a calculus problem - and in particular to perform integration - you have to be smart about which integration technique should be used: integration by partial fractions, integration by parts, and so on.
creativity innovation way
You don't understand anything unless you understand there are at least 3 ways.
discovery astrology intellectual
But just as astronomy succeeded astrology, following Kepler's discovery of planetary regularities, the discoveries of these many principles in empirical explorations of intellectual processes in machines should lead to a science, eventually.
simple ideas common-sense
Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas - of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances and checks.
pet might lucky
Once the computers got control, we might never get it back. We would survive at their sufferance. If we're lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets.
block people robots
There was a failure to recognize the deep problems in AI; for instance, those captured in Blocks World. The people building physical robots learned nothing.
goal language computer
Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.