Marvin Minsky Quotes
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We usually say that one must first understand simpler things. But what if feelings and viewpoints are the simpler things?
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Stanley Kubrick knew we had good graphics around MIT and came to my lab to find out how to do it. We had some really good stuff. I was very impressed with Kubrick; he knew all the graphics work I had ever heard of, and probably more.
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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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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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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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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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Old answers never perfectly suit new questions, except in the most formal, logical circumstances.
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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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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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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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Changing the states of many agents grossly alters behavior, while changing only a few just perturbs the overall disposition a little.
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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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Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.
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I maintain that attitudes do really precede propositions, feelings come before facts.
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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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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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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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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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There are three basic approaches to AI: Case-based, rule-based, and connectionist reasoning.
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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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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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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.