Marvin Minsky Quotes

Interactive computers and software will, I think, provide a less costly method of doing some kinds of inquiry, in knowledge acquisition and even reasoning and interaction.

Twenty-five years ago, the notion was you could create a general problem-solver software that could solve problems in many different domains. That just turned out to be totally wrong.

The real goal of AI is to understand and build devices that can perceive, reason, act, and learn at least as well as we can.

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

Many researchers are exploring other forms of AI, some of which have proved useful in limited contexts; there may well be a breakthrough that makes higher levels of intelligence possible, but there is still no clear path yet to this goal.

Artificial intelligence is one of 50 things that Watson does. There is also machine learning, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and different analytical engines - they're like little Lego bricks. You can put intelligence in any product or any process you have.

If you step back a little and say we want to do A.I., then you will realize that A.I. needs knowledge, reasoning, and explanation.

I have always been convinced that the only way to get artificial intelligence to work is to do the computation in a way similar to the human brain. That is the goal I have been pursuing. We are making progress, though we still have lots to learn about how the brain actually works.

There's a great phrase, written in the '70s: 'The definition of today's AI is a machine that can make a perfect chess move while the room is on fire.' It really speaks to the limitations of AI. In the next wave of AI research, if we want to make more helpful and useful machines, we've got to bring back the contextual understanding.

IA is something that is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized by its developers for what it is.

I'm fascinated by artificial intelligence.

Nobody phrases it this way, but I think that artificial intelligence is almost a humanities discipline. It's really an attempt to understand human intelligence and human cognition.

I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

The ultimate search engine would basically understand everything in the world, and it would always give you the right thing. And we're a long, long ways from that.

It would help if human experts agreed on the meaning of such basic terms as intelligence, consciousness, or awareness. They don't. It's hard to build something that's incompletely defined.

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 people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings, they are usually imagining an AI project.

My goal is to create friend machines. Friendly genius machines. Machines with genius capabilities.

I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence.

I'm working on artificial intelligence. Actually, natural language understanding, which is to get computers to understand the meaning of documents.

A smart model is a good model.

We have to make machines understand what they're doing, or they won't be able to come back and say, 'Why did you do that?'

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.

We've seen computers play chess and beat grand masters. We've seen computers drive a car across a desert. But interestingly, playing chess is easy, but having a conversation about nothing is really difficult for a computer.

Is artificial intelligence less than our intelligence?