Marvin Minsky Quotes
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Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.
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Old answers never perfectly suit new questions, except in the most formal, logical circumstances.
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Our culture has a universal myth in which we see emotion as more complex and obscure than intellect. Indeed, emotion might be 'deeper' in some sense of prior evolution, but this need not make it harder to understand; in fact, I think today we actually know much more about emotion than about reason.
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When no idea seems right, the right one must seem wrong.
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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.
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Most of our future attempts to build large, growing Artificial Intelligences will be subject to all sorts of mental disorders.
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Perhaps it is no accident that one meaning of the word express is 'to squeeze'-for when you try to 'express yourself,' your language resources will have to pick and choose among the descriptions your other resources construct-and then attempt to squeeze a few of these through your tiny channels of phrases and gestures.
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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.
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We still remain prone to doctrines, philosophies, faiths, and beliefs that spread through the populations of entire civilizations. It is hard to imagine any foolproof ways to protect ourselves from such infections. ...the best we can do is to try to educate our children to learn more skills of critical thinking and methods of scientific verification.
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Kubrick's vision seemed to be that humans are doomed, whereas Clarke's is that humans are moving on to a better stage of evolution.
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A memory should induce a state through which we see current reality as an instance of the remembered event - or equivalently, see the past as an instance of the present. ...the system can perform a computation analogous to one from the memorable past, but sensitive to present goals and circumstances.
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I maintain that attitudes do really precede propositions, feelings come before facts.
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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.
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No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing; but most of the time, we aren't either.
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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!
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Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.
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Innate sentic detectors could help by teaching children about their own affective states. For if distinct signals arouse specific states, the child can associate those signals with those states. Just knowing that such states exist, that is, having symbols for them, is half the battle.
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I heard that the same thing occurred in a scene in Alien, where the creature pops out of the chest of a crewman. The other actors didn't know what was to happen; the director wanted to get true surprise.
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Since we have no systematic way to avoid all the inconsistencies of commonsense logic, each person must find his own way by building a private collection of 'cognitive censors' to suppress the kinds of mistakes he has discovered in the past.
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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.
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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.
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This book... too, is a society - of many small ideas. Each by itself is only common sense, yet when we join enough of them we explain the strangest mysteries of mind.
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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.
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There are three basic approaches to AI: Case-based, rule-based, and connectionist reasoning.