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Marvin Minsky
68 quotes
“For generations, scientists and philosophers have tried to explain ordinary reasoning in terms of logical principles — with virtually no success. I suspect this enterprise failed because it was looking in the wrong direction: common sense works so well not because it is an approximation of logic; logic is only a small part of our great accumulation of different, useful ways to chain things together.”
Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perceptrons have been widely publicized as “pattern recognition” or “learning” machines and as such have been discussed in a large number of books, journal articles, and voluminous “reports.” Most of this writing...is without scientific value.”
Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We do not see that any good can come of experiments which pay no attention to limiting factors that will assert themselves as soon as the small model is scaled up to a usable size.”
Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[We] became involved with a somewhat therapeutic compulsion: to dispel what we feared to be the first shadows of a “holistic” or “Gestalt” misconception that would threaten to haunt the fields of engineering and artificial intelligence as it had earlier haunted biology and psychology. For this, and for a variety of more practical and theoretical goals, we set out to find something about the range and limitations of perceptrons.”
Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Have you considered perceptrons with many layers? ... We have not found (by thinking or by studying the literature) any other really interesting class of multilayered machine, at least none whose principles seem to have a significant relation to those of the perceptron. To see the force of this qualification it is worth pondering the fact, trivial in itself, that a universal computer could be built entirely out of linear threshold modules. This does not in any sense reduce the theory of computation and programming to the theory of perceptrons.”
Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I suspect our human "thinking processes" often "break down," but you rarely notice anything's wrong, because your systems so quickly switch you to think in different ways, while the systems that failed are repaired or replaced.”
Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most of our future attempts to build large, growing Artificial Intelligences will be subject to all sorts of mental disorders.”
Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“‘In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being. I mean a machine that will be able to read Shakespeare, grease a car, play office politics, tell a joke, have a fight. At that point the machine will begin to educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months it will be at genius level and a few months after that its powers will be incalculable... 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... I have warned [people in the Pentagon] again and again that we are getting into very dangerous country. They don’t seem to understand.”
Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Meet Shakey, The First Electronic Person by Brad Darrach, LIFE, November 20, 1970.
“I had the naive idea that if one could build a big enough network, with enough memory loops, it might get lucky and acquire the ability to envision things in its head. This became a field of study later. It was called self-organizing random networks. Even today, I still get letters from young students who say, 'Why are you people trying to program intelligence? Why don't you try to find a way to build a nervous system that will just spontaneously create it?' Finally, I decided that either this was a bad idea or it would take thousands or millions of neurons to make it work, and I couldn't afford to try to build a machine like that.”
Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am inclined to doubt that anything very resembling formal logic could be a good model for human reasoning. In particular, I doubt that any logic that prohibits self-reference can be adequate for psychology: no mind can have enough power — without the power to think about Thinking itself. Without Self-Reference it would seem immeasurably harder to achieve Self-Consciousness — which, so far as I can see, requires at least some capacity to reflect on what it does. If Russell shattered our hopes for making a completely reliable version of commonsense reasoning, still we can try to find the islands of "local consistency," in which naive reasoning remains correct.”
Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All intelligent persons also possess some larger-scale frame-systems whose members seemed at first impossibly different — like water with electricity, or poetry with music. Yet many such analogies — along with the knowledge of how to apply them — are among our most powerful tools of thought. They explain our ability sometimes to see one thing — or idea — as though it were another, and thus to apply knowledge and experience gathered in one domain to solve problems in another. It is thus that we transfer knowledge via the paradigms of Science. We learn to see gases and fluids as particles, particles as waves, and waves as envelopes of growing spheres.”
Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One popular version is that the publication of our book so discouraged research on learning in network machines that a promising line of research was interrupted. Our version is that progress had already come to a virtual halt because of the lack of adequate basic theories... Most theorists had tried to focus only on the mathematical structure of what was common to all learning, and the theories to which this had led were too general and too weak to explain which patterns perceptrons could learn to recognize... The trouble appeared when perceptrons had no way to represent the knowledge required for solving certain problems. The moral was that one simply cannot learn enough by studying learning by itself; one also has to understand the nature of what one wants to learn.”
Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“More concretely, we would call the student's attention to the following considerations: 1. Multilayer machines with loops clearly open all the questions of the general theory of automata. 2. A system with no loops but with an order restriction at each layer can compute only predicates of finite order. 3. On the other hand, if there is no restriction except for the absence of loops, the monster of vacuous generality once more raises its head. The perceptron has shown itself worthy of study despite (and even because of!) its severe limitations. It has many features to attract attention: its linearity; its intriguing learning theorem; its clear paradigmatic simplicity as a kind of parallel computation. There is no reason to suppose that any of these virtues carry over to the many-layered version. Nevertheless, we consider it to be an important research problem to elucidate (or reject) our intuitive judgment that the extension is sterile. Perhaps some powerful convergence theorem will be discovered, or some profound reason for the failure to produce an interesting “learning theorem” for the multilayered machine will be found.”
Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We could extend them either by scaling up small connectionist models or by combining small-scale networks into some larger organization. In the first case, we would expect to encounter theoretical obstacles to maintaining [generalized delta rule]’s effectiveness on larger, deeper nets. And despite the reputed efficacy of other alleged remedies for the deficiencies of hill-climbing, such as “annealing,” we stay with our research conjecture that no such procedures will work very well on large-scale nets, except in the case of problems that turn out to be of low order in some appropriate sense. The second alternative is to employ a variety of smaller networks rather than try to scale up a single one... No single-method learning scheme can operate efficiently for every possible task; we cannot expect any one type of machine to account for any large portion of human psychology.”
Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source