.
What do Albert Einstein, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Arthur C. Clark, and Stanley Kubrick have in common? Sure they are the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century, except Kubrick. But then he popularized modern science in the movies when he produced and released the revolutionary
2001 A Space Odyssey movie written by Clarke in 1968.
All were friends and associates of Marvin Minsky, the founder of The Media Lab and Artificial Intelligence from MIT.
I interviewed Minsky several times in 1986 and then became part of his Society of the Mind and attended his events including the time he had Arthur C. Clarke as guest. To hear Minsky talk about the old days with his friends, all beyond genius in my book, was fascinating.
Thanks to a very dear friend of mine, Margaret Sanders, the daughter of Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame, I was able to get to know Marvin and his wife Gloria and have dinner at their house where he told endless stories of their early escapades.
 |
| Kubrick and Clarke |
Marvin and friends enjoyed a slightly different lifestyle than most of us. While I was playing sandlot baseball they were rewiring houses, inventing automatic lighting systems, and figuring out how to change the image of science fiction in the movies. That was the reason Kubrick came to Minsky to solve the technical problems when making
2001 A Space Odyssey.
Sometimes the greatest accomplishments in life are the result of the most unusual sequence of events. I was researching a story on Plato's book on the Lost Continent of Atlantis when I stumbled across information that Maggie Sanders, the oldest daughter of the Colonel and one who inspired him to originate the take out concept of fast food marketing, was connected to Atlantis.
She had financed expeditions to find evidence of the Lost World of Atlantis, and had discovered the massive roads and buildings in the ocean by Bimini. I was in NYC at the time but much of my family was in Kentucky and my mother had just appeared as an extra in a movie and met Maggie Sanders.
I arranged to meet her and discovered she was deeply involve in the American Academy of Science and had met Einstein through her work with the Academy. We became great friends and I would travel with her all over the country and learned of her amazing relationship with all these prominent scientists.
Maggie knew more Nobel prize winners than anyone I ever met and would suddenly hand me a phone when we were travelling to some event so I could interview one of them. Two of her oldest friends were Marvin and his wife Gloria so of course when she found out I wanted to do stories about the Media Lab at MIT she arranged for us to go there and meet with Minsky.
From then on we attended the Society of the Mind gatherings.
Well here are the obituaries of Marvin Minsky. My contribution to them might be that I found him to have a great sense of humor, he loved the camaraderie of his close friends, he enjoyed practical jokes, and he was living proof of the motto over the entrance to The MIT Media Lab, "
We invent the future."
Marvin is now back with his gang of friends, Albert Einstein, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Arthur C. Clark, and Stanley Kubrick, and he has achieved the immortality he always expected to find.
MIT Media Lab News
Marvin Minsky,
“father of artificial intelligence,” dies at 88
Professor emeritus was
a co-founder of CSAIL and a founding member of the Media Lab.
MIT Media Lab
January 25, 2016
Marvin Minsky, a
mathematician, computer scientist, and pioneer in the field of artificial
intelligence, died at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital on Sunday, Jan. 24,
of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 88.
Minsky, a professor
emeritus at the MIT Media Lab, was a pioneering thinker and the foremost expert
on the theory of artificial intelligence. His 1985 book “The Society of Mind”
is considered a seminal exploration of intellectual structure and function,
advancing understanding of the diversity of mechanisms interacting in
intelligence and thought. Minsky’s last book, “The Emotion Machine:
Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the
Future of the Human
Mind,” was published in 2006.
Minsky viewed the
brain as a machine whose functioning can be studied and replicated in a
computer — which would teach us, in turn, to better understand the human brain
and higher-level mental functions: How might we endow machines with common
sense — the knowledge humans acquire every day through experience? How, for
example, do we teach a sophisticated computer that to drag an object on a
string, you need to pull, not push — a concept easily mastered by a
two-year-old child?
"Very few people
produce seminal work in more than one field; Marvin Minksy was that caliber of
genius," MIT President L. Rafael Reif says. "Subtract his
contributions from MIT alone and the intellectual landscape would be
unrecognizable: without CSAIL, without the Media Lab, without the study of
artificial intelligence and without generations of his extraordinarily creative
students and protégés. His curiosity was ravenous. His creativity was beyond
measuring. We can only be grateful that he made his intellectual home at MIT.”
A native New Yorker,
Minsky was born on Aug. 9, 1927, and entered Harvard University
after returning from service in the U.S. Navy during World War II. After
graduating from Harvard with honors in 1950, he attended Princeton University,
receiving his PhD in mathematics in 1954. In 1951, his first year at Princeton, he built the first neural network simulator.
Minsky joined the
faculty of MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in
1958, and co-founded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (now the Computer Science
and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) the following year. At the
AI Lab, he aimed to explore how to endow machines with human-like perception
and intelligence. He created robotic hands that can manipulate objects,
developed new programming frameworks, and wrote extensively about philosophical
issues in artificial intelligence.
“Marvin Minsky helped
create the vision of artificial intelligence as we know it today,” says CSAIL
Director Daniela Rus, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in MIT’s Department
of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “The challenges he defined are
still driving our quest for intelligent machines and inspiring researchers to
push the boundaries in computer science.”
Minsky was convinced
that humans will one day develop machines that rival our own intelligence. But
frustrated by a shortage of both researchers and funding in recent years, he
cautioned, “How long this takes will depend on how many people we have working
on the right problems.”
In 1985, Minsky became
a founding member of the MIT Media Lab, where he was named the Toshiba
Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and where he continued to teach and
mentor until recently.
Professor Nicholas
Negroponte, co-founder and chairman emeritus of the Media Lab, says: “Marvin
talked in riddles that made perfect sense, were always profound and often so
funny that you would find yourself laughing days later. His genius was so
self-evident that it defined ‘awesome.’ The Lab bathed in his reflected light.”
In addition to his
renown in artificial intelligence, Minsky was a gifted pianist — one of only a
handful of people in the world who could improvise fugues, the polyphonic
counterpoint that distinguish Western classical music. His influential 1981
paper “Music, Mind and Meaning” illuminated the connections between music, psychology,
and the mind.
Other achievements
include Minsky’s role as the inventor of the earliest confocal scanning
microscope. He was also involved in the inventions of the first “turtle,” or
cursor, for the LOGO programming language, with Seymour Papert, and the “Muse”
synthesizer for musical variations, with Ed Fredkin.
Minsky received the
world’s top honors for his pioneering work and mentoring role in the field of
artificial intelligence, including the A.M. Turing Award — the highest honor in
computer science — in 1969.
In addition to the
Turing Award, Minsky received honors over the years including the Japan Prize;
the Royal Society of Medicine’s Rank Prize (for Optoelectronics); the Optical
Society of America’s R.W. Wood Prize; MIT’s James R. Killian Jr. Faculty
Achievement Award; the Computer Pioneer Award from IEEE Computer Society; the
Benjamin Franklin Medal; and, in 2014, the Dan David Foundation Prize for the
Future of Time Dimension titled “Artificial Intelligence: The Digital Mind,”
and the BBVA Group’s BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Lifetime
Achievement Award.
Minsky is survived by
his wife, Gloria Rudisch Minsky, MD, and three children: Henry, Juliana,
and Margaret Minsky. The family requests that memorial contributions be
directed to the Marvin Minsky Foundation, which supports research in artificial
intelligence, including support for graduate students.
A celebration of
Minsky’s life will be held at the MIT Media Lab later this year.
The Washington Post
“The world has lost one of its greatest minds in
science.” R.I.P. Marvin Minsky
January 26
Marvin
Minsky, a legendary cognitive scientist who pioneered the field of artificial
intelligence, died Sunday at the age of 88. His death was announced by Nicholas
Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, who distributed an email to his
colleagues:
With
great great sadness, I have to report that Marvin Minsky died last night. The
world has lost one of its greatest minds in science. As a founding faculty
member of the Media Lab he brought equal measures of humour and deep thinking,
always seeing the world differently. He taught us that the difficult is often
easy, but the easy can be really hard.
In
1956, when the very idea of a computer was only a couple of decades old, Minsky
attended a symposium at Dartmouth
that is considered the founding event in the field of artificial intelligence.
His 1960 paper, "Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence," laid out many
of the routes that researchers would take in the decades to come. He founded
the Artificial Intelligence lab at MIT, and wrote seminal books — including
"The Society of Mind” and “The Emotion Machine” — that colleagues consider
essential to understanding the challenges in creating machine intelligence.
You
get a sense of his storied and varied career from his home page at MIT:
In
1951 he built the SNARC, the first neural network simulator. His other
inventions include mechanical arms, hands and other robotic devices, the
Confocal Scanning Microscope, the “Muse” synthesizer for musical variations
(with E. Fredkin), and one of the first LOGO “turtles”. A member of the NAS,
NAE and Argentine NAS, he has received the ACM Turing Award, the MIT Killian Award, the Japan Prize, the IJCAI Research Excellence Award, the
Rank Prize and the Robert Wood Prize for Optoelectronics, and the Benjamin
Franklin Medal.
One of
his former students, Patrick Winston, now a professor at M.I.T., wrote a brief
tribute to his friend and mentor:
Many
years ago, when I was a student casting about for what I wanted to do, I
wandered into one of Marvin's classes. Magic happened. I was awed and inspired.
I left that class saying to myself, “I want to do what he does.”
M.I.T.'s obituary
of Minsky explains some of the professor's critical insights into the
challenge facing anyone trying to replicate or in some way match human
intelligence within the constraints of a machine:
Minsky
viewed the brain as a machine whose functioning can be studied and replicated
in a computer — which would teach us, in turn, to better understand the human
brain and higher-level mental functions: How might we endow machines with
common sense — the knowledge humans acquire every day through experience? How,
for example, do we teach a sophisticated computer that to drag an object on a
string, you need to pull, not push — a concept easily mastered by a
two-year-old child?
His
field went through some hard times, but Minsky thrived. Although he was an
inventor, his great contributions were theoretical insights into how the human
mind operates.
In a
letter nominating Minsky for an award, Prof. Winston described a core concept
in Minsky's book "The Society of Mind": "[I]ntelligence emerges
from the cooperative behavior of myriad little agents, no one of which is
intelligent by itself." If a single word could encapsulate Minsky's
professional career, Winston said in a phone interview Tuesday, it would be
"multiplicities."
The
word "intelligence," Minsky believed, was a "suitcase
word," Winston said, because "you can stuff a lot of ideas into it.”
His
colleagues knew Minsky as a man who was strikingly clever in conversation, with
an ability to anticipate what others are thinking -- and then conjure up an
even more intriguing variation on those thoughts.
Singularity Symposium
Who
is Marvin Minsky?
Marvin Minsky
is listed on Google Directory as one of the all time top six people in the
field of artificial intelligence.
Isaac Asimov
once described him as one of only two people he would admit were more intelligent
than Asimov was (the other being Carl Sagan).
...Ray
Kurzweil has referred to him as his mentor.
A philosopher
and scientist, Marvin Lee Minsky was born in New York City
on August 9, 1927, where he attended the Fieldston School
and the Bronx High School of Science.
He served in
the US Navy from 1944 to 1945 and received a BA from Harvard in 1950 and a PhD
in mathematics from Princeton in 1954.
In 1959
Marvin Misky and John McCarthy founded what is now known as the MIT Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory. He is currently the Toshiba Professor of
Media Arts and Sciences, and Professor of electrical engineering and computer
science.
Minsky was an
adviser on the 1968 Stanley Kubrick classic science fiction movie 2001: A Space
Odyssey and is referred to in both the movie and the book. He won
the Turing Award in 1969, the Japan Prize in 1990, the IJCAI Award for Research
Excellence in 1991, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute
in 2001.
Inventor and
author, Minsky is universally regarded as one of the world's leading
authorities in artificial intelligence who has made fundamental contributions to
the fields of robotics and computer-aided learning technologies.
Some of his
most notable books include The
Society of Mind
border=0 v:shapes="_x0000_i1025">
, Perceptrons
v:shapes="_x0000_i1026"> (which he co-authored with Seymor Papert)
and, most recently, The
Emotion Machine.
Scientific American
The Many Minds of Marvin
Minsky (R.I.P.)
The late Marvin Minsky, a pioneer of artificial
intelligence, was a paradoxical figure, who once said Freud was his favorite
theorist of mind.
Marvin Minsky, a pioneer
of artificial intelligence, died on Sunday, January 24, in Boston, according
to The New York Times. He was 88. Minsky contributed two important articles
to Scientific American: Artificial
Intelligence, on his theories of multiple minds, and Will
Robots Inherit The Earth?, on the future of AI. I profiled Minsky for
Scientific American in 1993, after spending an afternoon with him at MIT’s
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and again in The End of Science. Below
is an edited version of the latter profile. -–John Horgan
Before I visited Marvin
Minsky at MIT, colleagues warned me that he might be defensive, even hostile.
If I did not want the interview cut short, I should not ask him too bluntly
about the falling fortunes of artificial intelligence or of his own particular
theories of the mind. A former associate pleaded with me not to take advantage
of Minsky's penchant for outrageous utterances. "Ask him if he means it,
and if he doesn't say it three times you shouldn't use it."
When I met Minsky, he was
rather edgy, but the condition seemed congenital rather than acquired. He
fidgeted ceaselessly, blinking, waggling his foot, pushing things about his
desk. Unlike most scientific celebrities, he gave the impression of conceiving
ideas and tropes from scratch rather than retrieving them whole from memory. He
was often but not always incisive. "I'm rambling here," he muttered
after a riff on verifying mind-models collapsed in a heap of sentence
fragments.
Even his physical appearance
had an improvisational air. His large, round head seemed entirely bald but was
actually fringed by hairs as transparent as optical fibers. He wore a braided
belt that supported, in addition to his pants, a belly pack and a tiny holster
containing pliers with retractable jaws. With his paunch and vaguely Asian
features, he resembled Buddha--Buddha reincarnated as a hyperactive hacker.
Minsky seemed unable--or
unwilling--to inhabit any emotion for long. Early on, he lived up to his
reputation as a curmudgeon and arch-reductionist. He expressed contempt for
those who doubt computers can be conscious. Consciousness is a
"trivial" issue, he said. "I've solved it, and I don't
understand why people don't listen." Consciousness is merely a type of
short-term memory, a "low-grade system for keeping records." In fact,
computer programs such as LISP, which allow their processing steps to be
retraced, are "extremely conscious," more so than we humans, with our
pitifully shallow memory banks.
The only theorist of mind
other than himself who truly grasped the mind's complexity was dead.
"Freud has the best theories so far, next to mine, of what it takes to
make a mind,” Minsky said.
Minsky derided Gerald
Edelman's re-entrant-loops hypothesis as warmed-over feedback theory. Minsky
even snubbed MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which he had founded and
where we happened to be meeting. "I don't consider this to be a serious
research institution at the moment," he announced.
But as we wandered through
the lab looking for a lecture on a chess-playing computer, a metamorphosis
occurred. "Isn't the chess meeting supposed to be here?" Minsky asked
a group of researchers chatting in a lounge. "That was yesterday,"
someone replied.
After asking about the chess
talk, Minsky spun tales about the history of chess-playing programs. This
mini-lecture evolved into a reminiscence of Minsky's late friend
Isaac Asimov. Minsky said Asimov--who popularized the term "robot"
and explored its metaphysical implications in his science fiction—declined to
see robots at MIT, fearing that his imagination "would be weighed down by
this boring realism."
One lounger, noticing that
he and Minsky wore the same pliers, yanked his instrument from its holster and
flicked its retractable jaws into place. "En garde," he said. Grinning, Minsky drew his pliers,
and he and his challenger jabbed the tools at each other like punks in a knife
fight.
Minsky expounded on the
versatility and--an important point for him--drawbacks of the pliers; his pair
pinched him during certain maneuvers. "Can you take it apart with
itself?" someone asked. Everyone laughed at this allusion to a fundamental
problem in robotics.
Returning to Minsky's
office, we encountered a young, extremely pregnant Korean woman. She was a
doctoral candidate scheduled for an oral exam the next day. "Are you
nervous?" asked Minsky. "A little," she replied. "You
shouldn't be," he said, and gently pressed his forehead against hers, as
if seeking to infuse her with his strength.
I realized, watching this
scene, that there are many Minskys.
But of course there would
be. Multiplicity is central to Minsky's view of the mind. In his book The Society of Mind he contends that
brains contain many different, highly specialized structures that evolved to
solve different problems.
"We have many layers of
networks of learning machines," he explained to me, "each of which
has evolved to correct bugs or to adapt the other agencies to the problems of
thinking." It is thus unlikely that the brain can be reduced to a
particular set of principles or axioms, "because we're dealing with a real
world instead of a mathematical one that is defined by axioms."
AI has not fulfilled its
early promise because modern researchers have succumbed to "physics
envy"--the desire to reduce the intricacies of the brain to simple
formulae. "They are defining smaller and smaller subspecialties that they
examine in more detail, but they're not open to doing things in a different
way."
AI researchers have failed
to heed Minsky’s message that the mind has many methods for coping with even a
single, simple problem. For example, someone whose television set fails to work
will probably first consider it to be a purely physical problem. He will check
to see whether the television is properly programmed or whether the cord is
plugged in. If that fails, the person may call a repairman, thus turning the
problem from a physical one to a social one--how to find a repairman who can do
the job quickly and cheaply.
"That's one lesson I
can't get across” to AI researchers, Minsky said. "It seems to me that the
problem the brain has more or less solved is how to organize different methods
into working when the individual methods fail pretty often."
As Minsky continued
speaking, his emphasis on multiplicity took on a metaphysical and even moral
cast. He blamed the problems of his field--and of science in general--on what
he called "the investment principle," which he defined as the
tendency of humans to keep doing something that they have learned to do well
rather than seeking new solutions.
Repetition, or, rather,
single-mindedness, seemed to hold a kind of horror for Minsky. "If there's
something you like very much," he asserted, "then you should regard
this not as you feeling good but as a kind of brain cancer, because it means
that some small part of your mind has figured out how to turn off all the other
things."
Minsky has mastered many
skills during his career--he is adept in mathematics, philosophy, physics,
neuroscience, robotics and computer science and has even written several
science-fiction novels—because he loves the "feeling of awkwardness"
triggered by learning something hard. "It's so thrilling not to be able to
do something. It's such a rare experience to treasure."
Minsky was a musical child
prodigy until he decided that music is a soporific. "I think the reason
people like music is to suppress thought--the wrong kinds of thought--not to
produce it." Minsky occasionally composes "Bach-like things" on
an electric piano in his office, but he tries to resist the impulse. "I
had to kill the musician at some point," he said. "It comes back
every now and then, and I hit it."
Minsky had no patience for
those who claim the mind can never be fully understood. "Look, before
Pasteur people said, 'Life is different. You can't explain it mechanically.'
It's just the same thing." But a final theory of the mind, Minsky
emphasized, will probably be extremely complex; after all, consider how long it
would take to describe precisely all the components and workings of an
automobile.
The truth of a final
mind-model could be demonstrated in several ways. First, a machine based on the
model's principles should be able to mimic human development. "The machine
ought to be able to start as a baby and grow up by seeing movies and playing
with things,” Minsky said. Moreover, as brain-imaging technology improves,
scientists should be able to determine whether the neural processes in living
humans corroborate the model.
"Once you get a [brain]
scanner that has one angstrom resolution, then you could see every neuron in
someone's brain. You watch this for 1,000 years and you say, Well, we know
exactly what happens whenever this person says ‘blue.’ And people check this
out for generations and the theory is sound. Nothing goes wrong, and that's the
end of it."
If scientists achieve a
final theory of mind, I asked, what frontiers will be left to explore?
"Why are you asking me
this question?" Minsky growled. The concern that scientists will run out
of things to do is "pitiful," he said. "There's plenty to do." We humans may well
be approaching our limits as scientists, but we will soon create machines much
smarter than us that can continue doing science.
But that would be machine
science, not human science, I said.
"You're a racist, in
other words," Minsky said, his great domed forehead purpling. I scanned
his face for signs of irony, but found none. "I think the important thing
for us is to grow,"
Minsky continued, "not to remain in our own present stupid state." We
humans, he added, are just "dressed up chimpanzees." Our task is not
to preserve present conditions but to evolve, and create beings smarter than
us.
When I asked what
super-intelligent machines might be interested in, Minsky suggested,
half-heartedly, that they might try to comprehend themselves as they kept
evolving. He was more enthusiastic discussing the conversion of human psyches
into digital avatars.
This technological advance
would allow Minsky to indulge in dangerous pursuits, such as taking LSD or
converting to a religious faith. "I regard religious experience as a very
risky thing to do because it can destroy your brain in a rapid way. But if I
had a backup copy..."
Minsky also wanted to know
what Yo-Yo Ma, the great cellist, feels like when playing a concerto. But to my
surprise, Minsky doubted whether such an experience is possible. To feel what
Yo-Yo Ma feels as he plays, Minsky explained, he would have to possess all
Yo-Yo Ma's memories. He would have to become
Yo-Yo Ma. But in becoming Yo-Yo Ma, Minsky would cease to be Minsky.
This was an extraordinary
admission for Minsky to make, because it implied that the essence of each
individual human might be irreducible and unknowable.
In spite of his reputation
as a rabid reductionist, Minsky was an anti-reductionist.
His revulsion toward single-mindedness, his fondness for Freud, his passion for
learning and novelty--all these traits were those of a scientific romantic, for
whom the quest mattered more
than mere knowledge.
The views expressed are
those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
New Technology
Marvin Minsky, the Man Who Built the First
Artificial Brain, Dead at 88
Minsky, an MIT professor, was the inventor of the first neural network,
the first graphical headset, one of the first programmable robots, and so much
more.
Jan 26, 2016
Isaac
Asimov, a scientist turned hard sci-fi writer, once remarked
that the only people he ever felt overshadowed him in intelligence were Carl
Sagan and Marvin Minsky. While the former is well known for his work
popularizing astronomy, planetary science, and astrobiology, the other was a
more obscure figure.
Minsky
died on Sunday at age 88, suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. His work
primarily involved artificial intelligence systems, writing some of the
foundational texts of the discipline and building one of the first
"artificial brains" in 1951.The Stochastic Neural-Analog
Reinforcement Computer, or SNARC, was capable of machine learning at a time
when most computers still ran on punchcards. He also created one of the
first head-mounted graphical displays, a predecessor to today's inventions
like the Oculus or Gear VR.
In
1954, he completed his dissertation at Princeton,
writing "Neural Nets and the Brain Model Problem," tackling some of the machine learning theories
to come. His work on neural nets continued even after they went out of fashion
in computing, though they've seen a recent resurgence in popularity with the
widespread availability of cloud computing.
Minsky
eventually made a home in 1958 at MIT as a math professor before founding the
Artificial Intelligence Project and co-directing the Artificial Intelligence
Lab from 1959 to 1974. He stayed at the university until recent years. He was
the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences from 1990 on.
A 1961
paper, "Steps
Toward Artificial Intelligence," laid out the road map for machine
learning, and is still considered one of the most important texts in artificial
intelligence today. In books like Society of Mind, he delved into the inner workings of the human
brain, and many of his writings tried to compare and contrast a human brain
from the robotic brains to come, and even wrote a paper on how we might be able
to make
contact with alien civilizations some day in a productive fashion.
Minsky skirted
the line between theorist, inventor, and philosopher, working with delicate
technological systems while staring firmly into the future of computing. Along
with his early AI headseat and artificial brain, Minsky also invented scanning
microscopes, synthesizers, robot arms, and early programmable toys.
.
