Marvin Minsky Quotes

1927–2016 United States

Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 - January 24, 2016) was an American scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of MIT's AI laboratory, author of several texts on AI and philosophy, and winner of the 1969 Turing Award.

United States
Computer scientists

Random Marvin Minsky quote

72 quotes

It's harmful, when naming leads the mind to think that names alone bring meaning close.

The Society of Mind (1987)

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

The "laws of thought" depend not only on the property of brain cells, but also on how they are connected.

The Society of Mind (1987)

There is no reason to suppose that any of these virtues carry over to the many-layered version.

Perceptrons (1988)

Every smart person wants to be corrected, not admired.

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.

The Society of Mind (1987)

Questions about arts, traits, and styles of life are actually quite technical. They ask us to explain what happens among the agents of our minds.

The Society of Mind (1987)

For generations, scientists and philosophers have tried to explain ordinary reasoning in terms of logical principles — with virtually no success.

The Society of Mind (1987)

The mind holds tightly to its secrets not from stinginess or shame, but simply because it does not know them.

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

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

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.

Perceptrons (1988)

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

In Managing an Information Security and Privacy Awareness and Training Program (2005)

Should one think of a city as having a Self?

The Emotion Machine (2006)

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

The Society of Mind (1987)

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

The Society of Mind (1987)

I maintain that attitudes do really precede propositions, feelings come before facts.

K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)

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.

Perceptrons (1988)

I am inclined to doubt that anything very resembling formal logic could be a good model for human reasoning.

Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious (1980)

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.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Marvin Minsky (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.