Top 85 Quotes & Sayings by Marvin Minsky

Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!

I started working at a point in history when digital computers were becoming mature, and before that, there were no such machines.

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.

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.

Sometimes a problem will seem completely insurmountable. Then someone comes up with a simple new idea, or just a rearrangement of old ideas, that completely eliminates it.

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.

The degree of intelligence that a man or a machine can show depends on many qualities of the ways that knowledge, goals, and problem-solving techniques are represented and put together, and not so much on the fine details.

General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.

It's degrading or insulting to say somebody is a good person or has a soul. Each person has built this incredibly complex structure, and if you attribute it to a magical pearl in the middle of an oyster that makes you good, that's trivializing a person and keeps you from thinking of what's really happening.

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

No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing; but most of the time, we aren't either.

Some people believe that you should die, and some people think dying is a nuisance. I'm one of the latter. So I think we should get rid of death.

If you just have a single problem to solve, then fine, go ahead and use a neural network. But if you want to do science and understand how to choose architectures, or how to go to a new problem, you have to understand what different architectures can and cannot do.

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!

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.

I think every person either inherits or eventually makes up their own idea of what they are and who they are and what caused the world to be, and it seems to me that these stories of creation myth, adopted by different cultures - most of them are less insightful than the stories made up by individual poets and writers.

We all admire great accomplishments in the sciences, arts, and humanities - but we rarely acknowledge how much we achieve in the course of our everyday lives.

With the appearance of communications networks and interconnected computers, we got the world wide web, and it changed the lives of most people, I think.

You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.

We humans are not the end of evolution, so if we can make a machine that's as smart as a person, we can probably also make one that's much smarter. There's no point in making just another person. You want to make one that can do things we can't.

In general we are least aware of what our minds do best.

Around 1967 Dan Bobrow wrote a program to do algebra problems based on symbols rather than numbers.

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.

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.

I think Lenat is headed in the right direction, but someone needs to include a knowledge base about learning.

I suspect that pleasure is mainly used to turn off parts of the brain so you can keep fresh the memories of things you're trying to learn. It protects the short-term memory buffers. That's one theory of pleasure.

The basic idea in case-based, or CBR, is that the program has stored problems and solutions. Then, when a new problem comes up, the program tries to find a similar problem in its database by finding analogous aspects between the problems.

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.

I believe that everyone has to construct a mental model of what they are and where they came from and why they are as they are, and the word soul in each person is the name for that particular mish-mash of those fully formed ideas of one's nature.

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.

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.

Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days.

If you understand something in only one way, then you don't really understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all other things we know. Well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that's what we mean by thinking!

Minds are simply what brains do.

You don't understand anything unless you understand there are at least 3 ways.

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

We rarely recognize how wonderful it is that a person can traverse an entire lifetime without making a single really serious mistake — like putting a fork in one's eye or using a window instead of a door.

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.

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.

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.

It makes no sense to seek a single best way to represent knowledge-because each particular form of expression also brings its particular limitations. For example, logic-based systems are very precise, but they make it hard to do reasoning with analogies. Similarly, statistical systems are useful for making predictions, but do not serve well to represent the reasons why those predictions are sometimes correct.

Logic doesn't apply to the real world.

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.

I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think that understanding spoils your experience... How would they know?

We'll show you that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.

Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.

In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best.

Within 10 years computers won't even keep us as pets.

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.

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

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.

What is intelligence, anyway It is only a word that people use to name those unknown processes with which our brains solve problems we call hard. But whenever you learn a skill yourself, you're less impressed or mystified when other people do the same. This is why the meaning of 'intelligence' seems so elusive: It describes not some definite thing but only the momentary horizon of our ignorance about how minds might work.

The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all the other things we know. That's why it's almost always wrong to seek the "real meaning" of anything. A thing with just one meaning has scarcely any meaning at all.

Imagine what it would be like if TV actually were good. It would be the end of everything we know.

Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men.

A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying ?rst a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren’t ?exible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.

One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry.

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

I bet the human brain is a kludge

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