Daniel Dennett is our best current philosopher. He is the next Bertrand Russell. Unlike traditional philosophers, Dan is a student of neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science, and psychology. He’s redefining and reforming the role of the philosopher.

— Marvin Minsky

Marvin Minsky Quotes

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...

— Marvin Minsky

We turn to quantities when we can’t compare the qualities of things.

— Marvin Minsky

Eventually, robots will make everything.

— Marvin Minsky

There are three basic approaches to AI: Case-based, rule-based, and connectionist reasoning.

— Marvin Minsky

Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children’s thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.

— Marvin Minsky

Everything is similar if you’re willing to look far out of focus.

— Marvin Minsky

In science, one learns the most by studying what seems to be the least.

— Marvin Minsky

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.

— Marvin Minsky

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.

— Marvin Minsky

Everything, including that which happens in our brains, depends on these and only on these: A set of fixed, deterministic laws.

— Marvin Minsky

But just as astronomy succeeded astrology, following Kepler’s discovery of planetary regularities, the discoveries of these many principles in empirical explorations of intellectual processes in machines should lead to a science, eventually.

— Marvin Minsky

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.

— Marvin Minsky

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.

— Marvin Minsky

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

— Marvin Minsky

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.

— Marvin Minsky

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.

— Marvin Minsky

Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas – of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances and checks.

— Marvin Minsky

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.

— Marvin Minsky

We must see that music theory is not only about music, but about how people process it. To understand any art, we must look below its surface into the psychological details of its creation and absorption.

— Marvin Minsky

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?”

— Marvin Minsky
More Marvin Minsky Quote >>
Privacy Policy   7.10ms  0.71MB