Marvin Minsky Quotes
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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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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.
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Concrete concepts are not necessarily the simplest ones. A novice best remembers 'being at' a concert. The amateur remembers more of what it 'sounded like.' Only the professional remembers the music itself, timbres, tones and textures.
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One's present personality cannot share all the thoughts of one's older personalities - and yet it has some sense that they exist. This is one reason why we feel that we possess an inner Self - a sort of ever-present person-friend, inside the mind, whom we can always ask for help.
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Most adults have some childlike fascination for making and arranging larger structures out of smaller ones.
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This is a tricky domain because, unlike simple arithmetic, to solve a calculus problem - and in particular to perform integration - you have to be smart about which integration technique should be used: integration by partial fractions, integration by parts, and so on.
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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.
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Theorems often tell us complex truths about the simple things, but only rarely tell us simple truths about the complex ones. To believe otherwise is wishful thinking or 'mathematics envy.'
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Hearing music is like viewing scenery and... when we hear good music our minds react in very much the same way they do when we see things.
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How many processes are going on, to keep that teacup level in your grasp? There must be a hundred of them.
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For avoiding nonsense in general, we might accumulate millions of censors. For all we know, this 'negative meta-knowledge' - about patterns of thought and inference that have been found defective or harmful - may be a large portion of all we know.
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An ethicist is someone who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind.
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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.
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We find things that do not fit into familiar frameworks hard to understand – such things seem meaningless.