Marvin Minsky Quotes

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.

Is artificial intelligence less than our intelligence?

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.

We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.

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.

I think what's really amazing is that given the scale of the web and getting the compute power we have today, we're starting to see things that appear intelligent but actually aren't semantically intelligent.

I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing.

My background really comes from geekdom and the idea of building a smart machine. If we're going to build a smart machine, let's have it read good books.

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.

By 2020, most home computers will have the computing power of a human brain. That doesn't mean that they are brains, but it means that in terms of raw processing, they can process bits as fast as a brain can. So the question is, how far behind that is the development of a machine that's as smart as we are?

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.

Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold.

I don't think there's anything unique about human intelligence.

My car and my adding machine understand nothing: they are not in that line of business.

The key to artificial intelligence has always been the representation.

We live in a world where all the parts of a robot are very cheap, yet we don't have a lot of robots. And the thing that has been missing has been good enough Artifical Intelligence.

I'd rather see artificial intelligence than no intelligence.

Robots have already surpassed human beings in calculation and memory, but I have no doubt that the time will come when they will surpass in wisdom as well.

I definitely fall into the camp of thinking of AI as augmenting human capability and capacity.

Look, when AIs come up, they're not going to be like us. A self-aware, sentient AI is not going to be like a human.

There's a long history of artificial intelligence programs that try to mimic what the brain is doing, but they've all fallen short.

Having been trained as a computer scientist in the '90s, everybody knew that AI didn't work. People tried it. They tried neural nets, and none of it worked.

The real use of AI in industry is generally for very narrow pattern-matchers - a better search algorithm, an object-detection algorithm, etc. These things are tools which we can use - for good or evil. But they're nothing like self-aware beings.

One of the interesting applications of symbolic systems is artificial intelligence, and I spent some time thinking about how to create a brain that operates the way ours does.