"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, "Why Programming Is a
Good", 1967)
"When a program grows in power by an evolution of partially understood patches and fixes, the programmer begins to lose track of internal details, loses his ability to predict what will happen, begins to hope instead of know, and watches the results as though the program were an individual whose range of behavior is uncertain. [...] This is already true in some big programs [...] developed and modified by several programmers, each testing them on different examples from different [remotely located computer] consoles and inserting advice independently. The program will grow in effectiveness, but no one of the programmers will understand it all. [...] Now we see the real trouble with statements like 'It only does what its programmer told it to do.' There isn't any one programmer." (Marvin M Minsky, "Design and Planning" II, 1967)
"Computer languages of the future will be more
concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the
programmer." (Marvin Minsky, "Form and Content in Computer
Science", [Turing Award lecture] 1969)
"What is the difference between merely knowing (or
remembering, or memorizing) and understanding? […] A thing or idea seems
meaningful only when we have several different ways to represent it - different
perspectives and different associations […]. Then we can turn it around in our
minds, so to speak: however it seems at the moment, we can see it another way
and we never come to a full stop. In other words, we can 'think' about it. If
there were only one way to represent this thing or idea, we would not call this
representation thinking." (Marvin Minsky, "Music, Mind, and
Meaning", 1981)
"The hardest problems we have to face do not come from
philosophical questions about whether brains are machines or not. There is not
the slightest reason to doubt that brains are anything other than machines with
enormous numbers of parts that work in perfect accord with physical laws. As
far as anyone can tell, our minds are merely complex processes. The serious problems
come from our having had so little experience with machines of such complexity
that we are not yet prepared to think effectively about them." (Marvin
Minsky, 1986)
"For generations, scientists and philosophers have tried to explain ordinary reasoning in terms of logical principles - with virtually no success. I suspect this enterprise failed because it was looking in the wrong direction: common sense works so well not because it is an approximation of logic; logic is only a small part of our great accumulation of different, useful ways to chain things together." (Marvin Minsky, "The Society of Mind", 1987)
"Every system that we build will surprise us with new
kinds of flaws until those machines become clever enough to conceal their
faults from us." (Marvin Minsky, "The Emotion Machine: Commonsense
Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind",
2006)
"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,
"The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and
the Future of the Human Mind", 2006)
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