62+ Marvin Minsky Quotes On Education, Ethics And Religion

Marvin Minsky was an American scientist who was a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and robotics. He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is considered one of the fathers of artificial intelligence and was a major influence in the development of modern AI. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Marvin Minsky on education, ethics, religion.

Top 10 Marvin Minsky Quotes

1. You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.
2. Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men.
3. Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days.
4. We'll show you that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.
5. I bet the human brain is a kludge
6. I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think that understanding spoils your experience... How would they know?
7. 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.
8. Minds are simply what brains do.
9. Everything, including that which happens in our brains, depends on these and only on these: A set of fixed, deterministic laws.
10. Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.

Marvin Minsky Short Quotes

• Listening to music engages the previously acquired personal knowledge of the listener.
• Imagine what it would be like if TV actually were good. It would be the end of everything we know.
• If we understood something just one way, we would not understand it at all.
• There are three basic approaches to AI: Case-based, rule-based, and connectionist reasoning.
• Within 10 years computers won't even keep us as pets.
• You don't understand anything unless you understand there are at least 3 ways.
• One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry.
• Eventually, robots will make everything.
• We turn to quantities when we can't compare the qualities of things.
• The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.

Marvin Minsky Quotes About World

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

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

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

Marvin Minsky Quotes About Mind

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

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

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

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

Marvin Minsky Quotes About Learn

In science, one learns the most by studying what seems to be the least. — Marvin Minsky

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

Experience has shown that science frequently develops most fruitfully once we learn to examine the things that seem the simplest, instead of those that seem the most mysterious. — Marvin Minsky

Marvin Minsky Quotes About Single

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

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

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

Marvin Minsky Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all the other things we know. That's why it's almost always wrong to seek the "real meaning" of anything. A thing with just one meaning has scarcely any meaning at all. — Marvin Minsky

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

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

All intelligent problem solvers are subject to the same ultimate constraints - limitations on space, time, and materials. — Marvin Minsky

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

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

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

What would a Martian visitor think to see a human being laugh? It must look truly horrible: the sight of furious gestures, flailing limbs, and thorax heaving in frenzied contortions. — Marvin Minsky

A couple of hundred years from now, maybe [science fiction writers] Isaac Asimov and Fred Pohl will be considered the important philosophers of the twentieth century, and the professional philosophers will almost all be forgotten, because they're just shallow and wrong, and their ideas aren't very powerful. — Marvin Minsky

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

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

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

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

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

Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do. — Marvin Minsky

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

Everything is similar if you're willing to look far out of focus. — Marvin Minsky

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

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

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

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

To say that the universe exists is silly, because it says that the universe is one of the things in the universe. So there's something wrong with questions like, "What caused the Universe to exist?" — Marvin Minsky

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

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

What is intelligence, anyway It is only a word that people use to name those unknown processes with which our brains solve problems we call hard. But whenever you learn a skill yourself, you're less impressed or mystified when other people do the same. This is why the meaning of 'intelligence' seems so elusive: It describes not some definite thing but only the momentary horizon of our ignorance about how minds might work. — Marvin Minsky

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

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

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

Life Lessons by Marvin Minsky

1. Marvin Minsky taught us to never give up on our dreams, no matter how difficult the task may seem. He was a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence and believed that anything is possible with hard work and dedication.
2. He also showed us the importance of collaboration and working with others to achieve a common goal. He was a founding member of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and worked with many other scientists to develop groundbreaking technology.
3. Lastly, Minsky demonstrated the power of curiosity and exploration. He was constantly pushing the boundaries of knowledge and exploring new ideas, even if they were unconventional or unpopular.