Minsky's book Perceptrons (written with Seymour Papert) attacked the work of
Frank Rosenblatt, and became the foundational work in the analysis of
artificial neural networks. The book is the center of a controversy in the history of AI, as some claim it to have had great importance in discouraging research of neural networks in the 1970s, and contributing to the so-called "
AI winter".[27] He also founded several other AI models. His paper A framework for representing knowledge[28] created a new paradigm in knowledge representation. While his Perceptrons is now more a historical than practical book, the theory of frames is in wide use.[29] Minsky also wrote of the possibility that
extraterrestrial life may think like humans, permitting communication.[30]
In the early 1970s, at the
MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, Minsky and Papert started developing what came to be known as the
Society of Mind theory. The theory attempts to explain how what we call intelligence could be a product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. Minsky says that the biggest source of ideas about the theory came from his work in trying to create a machine that uses a robotic arm, a video camera, and a computer to build with children's blocks. In 1986, Minsky published The Society of Mind, a comprehensive book on the theory which, unlike most of his previously published work, was written for the general public.
The MA-3 Robotic Manipulator Arm, on display at
MIT Museum
General view
The Belgrade Hand
In November 2006, Minsky published The Emotion Machine, a book that critiques many popular theories of how human minds work and suggests alternative theories, often replacing simple ideas with more complex ones. Recent drafts of the book are freely available from his webpage.[31]
Minsky also invented a "gravity machine" that would ring a bell if the
gravitational constant were to change, a theoretical possibility that is not expected to occur in the foreseeable future.[7]
Role in popular culture
Minsky was an adviser[32] on
Stanley Kubrick's movie
2001: A Space Odyssey; one of the movie's characters, Victor Kaminski, was named in Minsky's honor.[33] Minsky is mentioned explicitly in
Arthur C. Clarke's derivative novel of the same name, where he is portrayed as achieving a crucial break-through in artificial intelligence in the then-future 1980s, paving the way for
HAL 9000 in the early 21st century:
In the 1980s, Minsky and
Good had shown how
artificial neural networks could be generated automatically—self replicated—in accordance with any arbitrary learning program. Artificial brains could be grown by a process strikingly analogous to the development of a human brain. In any given case, the precise details would never be known, and even if they were, they would be millions of times too complex for human understanding.[34]
In the television anthology series
Fargo (Season 3) episode 3 (entitled "
The Law of Non-Contradiction"), at least two allusions are made to Minsky. The first, through the depiction of a "
useless machine": a device that was invented by Minsky as a philosophical joke. The second, through the depiction of an animation of a robot called "minsky" – a character in a sci-fi novel called "The Planet Wyh".
Personal life
In 1952, Minsky married pediatrician Gloria Rudisch; together they had three children.[35] Minsky was a talented improvisational pianist[36] who published musings on the relations between
music and psychology.
Opinions
Minsky was an atheist.[37] He was a signatory to the Scientists' Open Letter on
Cryonics.[38]
He was a critic of the
Loebner Prize for conversational robots,[39] and argued that a fundamental difference between
humans and
machines was that while humans are machines, they are machines in which intelligence emerges from the interplay of the many unintelligent but semi-autonomous agents that comprise the brain.[40] He argued that "somewhere down the line, some computers will become more intelligent than most people," but that it was very hard to predict how fast progress would be.[41] He cautioned that an artificial
superintelligence designed to solve an innocuous mathematical problem might decide to
assume control of Earth's resources to build supercomputers to help achieve its goal,[42] but believed that such negative scenarios are "hard to take seriously" because he felt confident that AI would go through a considerable degree of testing before being deployed.[43]
Association with Jeffrey Epstein
Minsky received a $100,000 research grant from
Jeffrey Epstein in 2002, four years before Epstein's first arrest for sex offenses; it was the first from Epstein to MIT. Minsky received no further research grants from him.[44][45]
Minsky organized two academic symposia on Epstein's private island
Little Saint James, one in 2002 and another in 2011, after Epstein was a registered sex offender.[46]Virginia Giuffre testified in a 2015 deposition in her defamation lawsuit against Epstein's associate
Ghislaine Maxwell that Maxwell "directed" her to have sex with Minsky among others. There has been no allegation that sex between them took place nor a lawsuit against Minsky's estate.[47] Minsky's widow, Gloria Rudisch, says that he could not have had sex with any of the women at Epstein's residences, as they were always together during all of the visits to Epstein's residences.[48]
^The patent for Minsky's Microscopy Apparatus was applied for in 1957, and subsequently granted US Patent Number 3,013,467 in 1961. According to his published biography on the MIT Media Lab webpage, "In 1956, when a Junior Fellow at Harvard, Minsky invented and built the first Confocal Scanning Microscope, an optical instrument with unprecedented resolution and image quality".
^Hillis, Danny;
McCarthy, John; Mitchell, Tom M.; Mueller, Erik T.; Riecken, Doug; Sloman, Aaron; Winston, Patrick Henry (2007). "In Honor of Marvin Minsky's Contributions on his 80th Birthday". AI Magazine. 28 (4): 109.
doi:
10.1609/aimag.v28i4.2064.
^Minsky, Marvin Lee (1986).
The Society of Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster.
ISBN978-0-671-60740-1. The first comprehensive description of the Society of Mind theory of intellectual structure and development. See also The Society of Mind (CD-ROM version), Voyager, 1996.
^Minsky, Marvin Lee (2007). The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster.
ISBN978-0-7432-7664-1.
^Minsky, Marvin Lee (1954). Theory of Neural-Analog Reinforcement Systems and Its Application to the Brain Model Problem (PhD thesis). Princeton University.
OCLC3020680.
ProQuest301998727.
^Minsky, M. (1975). A framework for representing knowledge. In P. H. Winston (Ed.), The psychology of computer vision. New York: McGraw-Hill Book.
^"Minsky's frame system theory". Proceedings of the 1975 workshop on Theoretical issues in natural language processing – TINLAP '75. 1975. pp. 104–116.
doi:
10.3115/980190.980222.
S2CID1870840.
^Lederman, Leon M.; Scheppler, Judith A. (2001).
"Marvin Minsky: Mind Maker". Portraits of Great American Scientists. Prometheus Books. p.
74.
ISBN9781573929325. Another area where he "goes against the flow" is in his spiritual beliefs. As far as religion is concerned, he's a confirmed atheist. "I think it [religion] is a contagious mental disease. ... The brain has a need to believe it knows a reason for things.
^Russell, Stuart J.;
Norvig, Peter (2003). "Section 26.3: The Ethics and Risks of Developing Artificial Intelligence".
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall.
ISBN978-0137903955. Similarly, Marvin Minsky once suggested that an AI program designed to solve the Riemann Hypothesis might end up taking over all the resources of Earth to build more powerful supercomputers to help achieve its goal.
Oral history interview with Terry Winograd at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Winograd describes his work in computer science, linguistics, and artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), discussing the work of Marvin Minsky and others.