Old answers never perfectly suit new questions, except in the most formal, logical circumstances. - Marvin Minsky

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.

Every system that we build will surprise us with new kinds of flaws until those machines become clever enough to conceal their faults from us.

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