Words matter. These are the best Marvin Minsky Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
If you just have a single problem to solve, then fine, go ahead and use a neural network. But if you want to do science and understand how to choose architectures, or how to go to a new problem, you have to understand what different architectures can and cannot do.
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.
We all admire great accomplishments in the sciences, arts, and humanities – but we rarely acknowledge how much we achieve in the course of our everyday lives.
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.
I think every person either inherits or eventually makes up their own idea of what they are and who they are and what caused the world to be, and it seems to me that these stories of creation myth, adopted by different cultures – most of them are less insightful than the stories made up by individual poets and writers.
General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.
By the way, it was his simulations that helped out in Jurassic Park – without them, there would have been only a few dinosaurs. Based on his techniques, Industrial Light and Magic could make whole herds of dinosaurs race across the screen.
We humans are not the end of evolution, so if we can make a machine that’s as smart as a person, we can probably also make one that’s much smarter. There’s no point in making just another person. You want to make one that can do things we can’t.
We wanted to solve robot problems and needed some vision, action, reasoning, planning, and so forth. We even used some structural learning, such as was being explored by Patrick Winston.
Once when I was standing at the base, they started rotating the set and a big, heavy wrench fell down from the 12 o’clock position of the set, and got buried in the ground a few feet from me. I could have been killed!
No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it’s doing; but most of the time, we aren’t either.
When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation; he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems.
You don’t understand anything until you learn it more than one way.
I believed in realism, as summarized by John McCarthy’s comment to the effect that if we worked really hard, we’d have an intelligent system in from four to four hundred years.
It’s degrading or insulting to say somebody is a good person or has a soul. Each person has built this incredibly complex structure, and if you attribute it to a magical pearl in the middle of an oyster that makes you good, that’s trivializing a person and keeps you from thinking of what’s really happening.
Sometimes a problem will seem completely insurmountable. Then someone comes up with a simple new idea, or just a rearrangement of old ideas, that completely eliminates it.
In general we are least aware of what our minds do best.
