Marvin Minsky famous quotes

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

#Learning #Way

A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first 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 flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Typewriters #Trying #Sound

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

#One Day #Three

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.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Technology #Years #Able

If we understood something just one way, we would not understand it at all.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Knowledge #Way #Understood

Logic doesn't apply to the real world.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Real #Knowledge #Math

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

#People #Fiction #Way

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

#Years #Pet #Computer

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

#Intelligent #Perfect #Diversity

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

#Mind

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

#Children #Earth #Robots

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.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Moving On #Vision #Evolution

An ethicist is someone who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Mind

Logic doesn't apply to the real world. D. R. Hofstadter and D. C. Dennett (eds.) The Mind's I, 1981.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Real #Mind #World

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

#Mind #Littles #Mindless

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

#Humorous #Thinking #People

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.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Psychology #Roles #Next

Minds are simply what brains do.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Brain #Mind

The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Brain #Making Changes #Principal

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.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Mistake #Eye #Doors

Speed is what distinguishes intelligence. No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to 'discover' that–where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Years #Bird #Evolution

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!
-- Marvin Minsky

#Differences #Car #Needs

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!
-- Marvin Minsky

#Mean #Thinking #Ideas

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

#Technology #Computer

But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does what it is works but what it does when it's stuck.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Levels #Doe #Bigs

It would be as useless to perceive how things 'actually look' as it would be to watch the random dots on untuned television screens.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Science #Looks #Television

The brain happens to be a meat machine.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Brain #Meat #Machines

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

#Law #Brain #Free Will

But just as astronomy succeeded astrology, following Kepler's discovery of planetary regularities, the discoveries of these many principles in empirical explorations of intellectual processes in machines should lead to a science, eventually.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Discovery #Astrology #Intellectual

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.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Knowledge #Expression #Analogies

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.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Vision #Robots #Action

Each part of the mind sees only a little of what happens in some others, and that little is swiftly refined, reformulated and "represented." We like to believe that these fragments have meanings in themselves-apart from the great webs of structure from which they emerge-and indeed this illusion is valuable to us qua thinkers-but not to us as psychologists-because it leads us to think that expressible knowledge is the first thing to study.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Believe #Knowledge #Thinking

We must see that music theory is not only about music, but about how people process it. To understand any art, we must look below its surface into the psychological details of its creation and absorption.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Music #Art #People

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.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Smart #Simple #Technique

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

#Creativity #Innovation #Way

I bet the human brain is a kludge
-- Marvin Minsky

#Brain #Human Brain #Humans

Listening to music engages the previously acquired personal knowledge of the listener.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Music #Listening #Listening To Music

Good theories of the mind must span at least three different scales of time: slow, for the billions of years in which our brains have survivied; fast, for the fleeting weeks and months of childhood; and in between, the centuries of growth of our ideas through history.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Years #Ideas #Childhood

Theorems often tell us complex truths about the simple things, but only rarely tell us simple truths about the complex ones. To believe otherwise is wishful thinking or "mathematics envy.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Believe #Simple #Thinking

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.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Pet #Might #Lucky

How many processes are going on, to keep that teacup level in your grasp? There must be a hundred of them.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Levels #Hundred #Process

The nature of mind: much of its power seems to stem from just the messy ways its agents cross-connect. ...it's only what we must expect from evolution's countless tricks.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Mind #Agents #Way

Each practitioner thinks there's one magic way to get a machine to be smart, and so they're all wasting their time in a sense. On the other hand, each of them is improving some particular method, so maybe someday in the near future, or maybe it's two generations away, someone else will come around and say, "Let's put all these together," and then it will be smart.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Smart #Thinking #Hands

How hard is it to build an intelligent machine? I don't think it's so hard, but that's my opinion, and I've written two books on how I think one should do it. The basic idea I promote is that you mustn't look for a magic bullet. You mustn't look for one wonderful way to solve all problems. Instead you want to look for 20 or 30 ways to solve different kinds of problems. And to build some kind of higher administrative device that figures out what kind of problem you have and what method to use.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Book #Intelligent #Thinking

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.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Intelligent #Years #Four

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.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Simple #Ideas #Common Sense

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

#Goal #Computer #Language

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.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Block #People #Robots

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

#Three #Cases #Approach

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

#Television #Tvs #Would Be

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.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Light #Race #Jurassic Park

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.
-- Marvin Minsky

#Vision #Mit #Excitement