Quotes by Marvin Minsky

“It would be as useless to perceive how things actually look as it would be to watch the random dots on untuned television screens”

“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!”

“No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what its doing; but most of the time, we arent either.”

“You dont understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”

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

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

We shouldnt let our envy of distinguished masters of the arts distract us from the wonder of how each of us gets new ideas. Perhaps we hold on to our superstitions about creativity in order to make our own deficiencies seem more excusable. For when we tell ourselves that masterful abilities are simply unexplainable, were also comforting ourselves by saying that those superheroes come endowed with all the qualities we dont possess. Our failures are therefore no fault of our own, nor are those heroes virtues to their credit, either. If it isnt learned, it isnt earned.When we actually meet the heroes whom our culture views as great, we dont find any singular propensities––only combinations of ingredients quite common in themselves. Most of these heroes are intensely motivated, but so are many other people. Theyre usually very proficient in some field--but in itself we simply call this craftmanship or expertise. They often have enough self-confidence to stand up to the scorn of peers--but in itself, we might just call that stubbornness. They surely think of things in some novel ways, but so does everyone from time to time. And as for what we call intelligence, my view is that each person who can speak coherently already has the better part of what our heroes have. Then what makes genius appear to stand apart, if we each have most of what it takes?I suspect that genius needs one thing more: in order to accumulate outstanding qualities, one needs unusually effective ways to learn. Its not enough to learn a lot; one also has to manage what one learns. Those masters have, beneath the surface of their mastery, some special knacks of higher-order expertise, which help them organize and apply the things they learn. It is those hidden tricks of mental management that produce the systems that create those works of genius. Why do certain people learn so many more and better skills? These all-important differences could begin with early accidents. One child works out clever ways to arrange some blocks in rows and stacks; a second child plays at rearranging how it thinks. Everyone can praise the first childs castles and towers, but no one can see what the second child has done, and one may even get the false impression of a lack of industry. But if the second child persists in seeking better ways to learn, this can lead to silent growth in which some better ways to learn may lead to better ways to learn to learn. Then, later, well observe an awesome, qualitative change, with no apparent cause--and give to it some empty name like talent, aptitude, or gift.

You dont understand anything until you learn it more than one way.

Kubricks vision seemed to be that humans are doomed, whereas Clarkes is that humans are moving on to a better stage of evolution.

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.

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.

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!