Marvin Minsky Quotes

If you like somebody's work -- just go and see them. However, don't ask for their autograph. A lot of people came and asked me for my autograph -- and it's creepy. What I did is read everything they published first... and correct them. That's what they really want. Every smart person wants to be corrected, not admired.

You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.

An ethicist is someone who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind.

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.

Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.

Speed is what distinguishes intelligence. No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to 'discover' that – where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed.

I had the naive idea that if one could build a big enough network, with enough memory loops, it might get lucky and acquire the ability to envision things in its head. This became a field of study later. It was called self-organizing random networks. Even today, I still get letters from young students who say, 'Why are you people trying to program intelligence? Why don't you try to find a way to build a nervous system that will just spontaneously create it?' Finally, I decided that either this was a bad idea or it would take thousands or millions of neurons to make it work, and I couldn't afford to try to build a machine like that.

‘In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being. I mean a machine that will be able to read Shakespeare, grease a car, play office politics, tell a joke, have a fight. At that point the machine will begin to educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months it will be at genius level and a few months after that its powers will be incalculable... 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... I have warned [people in the Pentagon] again and again that we are getting into very dangerous country. They don’t seem to understand.

Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.

In today's computer science curricula … almost all their time is devoted to formal classification of syntactic language types, defeatist unsolvability theories, folklore about systems programming, and generally trivial fragments of "optimization of logic design" — the latter often in situations where the art of heuristic programming has far outreached the special-case "theories" so grimly taught and tested — and invocations about programming style almost sure to be outmoded before the student graduates.