Marvin Minsky Quotes
Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men.
No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing; but most of the time, we aren't either.
Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days.
We'll show you that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.
I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think that understanding spoils your experience... How would they know?
It's ridiculous to live 100 years and only be able to remember 30 million bytes. You know, less than a compact disc. The human condition is really becoming more obsolete every minute.
Everything, including that which happens in our brains, depends on these and only on these: A set of fixed, deterministic laws.
Logic doesn't apply to the real world. D. R. Hofstadter and D. C. Dennett (eds.) The Mind's I, 1981.
Listening to music engages the previously acquired personal knowledge of the listener.
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.
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."
General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.
How many processes are going on, to keep that teacup level in your grasp? There must be a hundred of them.
There are three basic approaches to AI: Case-based, rule-based, and connectionist reasoning.
All intelligent problem solvers are subject to the same ultimate constraints - limitations on space, time, and materials.
Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.
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.
Imagine what it would be like if TV actually were good. It would be the end of everything we know.
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 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.
The nature of mind: much of its power seems to stem from just the messy ways its agents cross-connect. ...it's only what we must expect from evolution's countless tricks.
Experience has shown that science frequently develops most fruitfully once we learn to examine the things that seem the simplest, instead of those that seem the most mysterious.
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.
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.
What would a Martian visitor think to see a human being laugh? It must look truly horrible: the sight of furious gestures, flailing limbs, and thorax heaving in frenzied contortions.
But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does when it is works but what it does when it's stuck.
We wanted to solve robot problems and needed some vision, action, reasoning, planning, and so forth. We even used some structural learning, such as was being explored by Patrick Winston.
It would be as useless to perceive how things 'actually look' as it would be to watch the random dots on untuned television screens.
To say that the universe exists is silly, because it says that the universe is one of the things in the universe. So there's something wrong with questions like, "What caused the Universe to exist?"
