Marvin Minsky

From Philosopedia

Minsky, Marvin (9 August 1927 - )

New York City-born Minsky attended the Fieldson School and the Bronx High School of Science, as well as Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. From 1944 to 1945 he served in the U.S. Navy.

He holds a BA in Mathematics from Harvard (1950) and a PhD in the same field from Princeton (1954). Since 1958, Minsky has been Toshiba professor of media arts and sciences and professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Minsky's patents include the first head-mounted graphical display (1963) and the confocal scanning microscope (1961, a predecessor to today's widely used confocal laser scanning microscope). He developed with Seymour Papert the first Logo "turtle." Minsky also built, in 1951, the first randomly wired neural network learning machine, SNARC.

He is one of the world’s leading theorists of artificial intelligence. Life, he has stated, is as much about knowing how to avoid mistakes as knowing about what is right. Past myths may have made people feel good, but in the world of cyberspace some individuals unfortunately are clinging to the old instead of growing with the new. “People,” he appeals on behalf of activism, “need to grumble that the world does not make sense . . . but could.” Minsky is best known for research on knowledge representation, machine vision, robotics, computational complexity, and confocal microscopy. He has written The Society of Mind (1987) and in 1992, with Harry Harrison, The Turing Option, a novel about the future of artificial intelligence. As to whether machines can ever deal with the intangibles of humanness, Minsky told New York Times reporter Claudia Dreifus (28 July 1998):

It’s very tangible, what I’m talking about. For example, you can push something with a stick, but you can’t pull it. You can pull something with a string, but you can’t push it. That’s common sense. And no computer knows it. Right now, I’m writing a book, a sequel to The Society of Mind, and I am looking at some of this. What is pain? What is common sense? What is falling in love? What are emotions? Emotions are big switches, and there are hundreds of these. . . . If you look at a book about the brain, the brain just looks like switches. . . . You can think of the brain as a big supermarket of goodies that you can use for different purposes. Falling in love is turning on some 20 or 30 of these and turning a lot of the others off. It’s some particular arrangement. To understand it, one has to get some theory of what are the resources in the brain, what kind of arrangements are compatible, and what happens when you turn several on and they get into conflict. Being angry is another collection of switches. In this book, I’m trying to give examples of how these things work.

He then praised Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark, whose 2001: A Space Odyssey predictions were just about right in everything except for the date. His favorite sci-fi authors are Robert Heinlein, the late Isaac Asimov, Gregory Benford, David Brin, and Larry Niven. Also, Mary Shelley, who he said “was right in predicting how people would not understand the poor thing [Dr. Frankenstein’s creation]. “That’s such a sad story! By the way, I’ve gone through that book very carefully to see if she left any hints explaining how the robot worked. But alas, no clues and the funny part is when you read it, you don’t mind.”

A transhumanst, atheist, and thoroughgoing philosophic naturalist, Minsky - unlike too many secular humanists - has a rollicking sense of humor. His webpage is concise but thorough.

{CA; E; WAS, conversation 17 January 1997}