Marvin Minsky

Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research in artificial intelligence (AI). He co-founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory and wrote extensively about AI and philosophy.

Minsky received many accolades and honors, including the 1969 Turing Award.

Early life and education

Marvin Lee Minsky was born in New York City, to Henry, an eye surgeon, and Fannie (Reiser), a Zionist activist. His family was Jewish. He attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School and the Bronx High School of Science. He later attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He then served in the US Navy from 1944 to 1945. He received a B.A. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1950 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1954. His doctoral dissertation was titled "Theory of neural-analog reinforcement systems and its application to the brain-model problem." He was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1954 to 1957.

Minsky was on the MIT faculty from 1958 to his death. He joined the staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1958; a year later, he and John McCarthy initiated what was, as of 2003, named the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He was the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences as well as professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.

Contributions in computer science

Minsky's inventions include the first head-mounted graphical display (1963) and the confocal microscope (1957, a predecessor to today's widely used confocal laser scanning microscope). With Seymour Papert, he developed the first Logo "turtle". In 1951, Minsky built the first randomly wired neural network learning machine, SNARC. In 1962, he worked on small universal Turing machines and published his well-known 7-state, 4-symbol machine.

Minsky's book Perceptrons (written with 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 greatly discouraged research on neural networks in the 1970s and contributed to the so-called "AI winter". Minsky also founded several other AI models. His paper "A framework for representing knowledge" created a new paradigm in knowledge representation. Perceptrons is now more a historical than practical book, but the theory of frames is in wide use. Minsky also wrote of the possibility that extraterrestrial life may think like humans, thus permitting communication.

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 for the theory came from his work in trying to create a machine that uses a robotic arm, a videocamera, and a computer to build with children's blocks. In 1986, he 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.

In 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. Drafts of the book are available on his website.

Minsky also invented a "gravity machine" that will ring a bell if the gravitational constant changes, a theoretical possibility that is not expected to occur in the foreseeable future.

Role in popular culture

Minsky was an adviser on Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001: A Space Odyssey; one of the movie's characters, Victor Kaminski, was named in Minsky's honor. Minsky is mentioned explicitly in Arthur C. Clarke's derivative novel of the same name, where he is portrayed as achieving a crucial breakthrough 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.

In "The Law of Non-Contradiction", episode 3 of the television anthology series Fargo (Season 3), at least two allusions to Minsky are made. The first is through the depiction of a "useless machine": a device Minsky invented as a philosophical joke. The second is 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. Minsky was a talented improvisational pianist who published musings on the relations between music and psychology.

Opinions

Minsky was an atheist. He was a signatory to the Scientists' Open Letter on Cryonics.

He was a critic of the Loebner Prize for conversational robots, and argued that a fundamental difference between humans and machines is that while humans are machines, they are machines in which intelligence emerges from the interplay of the many unintelligent but semi-autonomous agents the brain comprises. 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. 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, but believed that such scenarios are "hard to take seriously" because he felt confident that AI would be well tested before being deployed.

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.

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. 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. 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 the visits to Epstein's residences.

Death

Minsky died of a cerebral hemorrhage in January 2016, at age 88. Minsky was a member of Alcor Life Extension Foundation's Scientific Advisory Board. Alcor will neither confirm nor deny whether Minsky was cryonically preserved.

Bibliography (selected)

1967 – Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines, Prentice-Hall
1969 – Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry, MIT Press
1986 – The Society of Mind
2006 – The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind

Awards and affiliations

Minsky won the Turing Award (the greatest distinction in computer science) in 1969, the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1982, the Japan Prize in 1990, the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence for 1991, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute for 2001. In 2006, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for co-founding the field of artificial intelligence, creating early neural networks and robots, and developing theories of human and machine cognition." In 2011, Minsky was inducted into IEEE Intelligent Systems' AI Hall of Fame for the "significant contributions to the field of AI and intelligent systems". In 2014, Minsky won the Dan David Prize for "Artificial Intelligence, the Digital Mind". He was also awarded with the 2013 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Information and Communication Technologies category.

Minsky was affiliated with the following organizations:

United States National Academy of Engineering
United States National Academy of Sciences
Extropy Institute's Council of Advisors
Alcor Life Extension Foundation's Scientific Advisory Board
kynamatrix Research Network's Board of Directors

Media appearances

Machine Dreams (1988)
Future Fantastic (1996)

Notes

References

External links

Scientist on the Set: An Interview with Marvin Minsky
Consciousness Is A Big Suitcase: A talk with Marvin Minsky
Video of Minsky speaking at the International Conference on Complex Systems, hosted by the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI)
"The Emotion Universe": Video with Marvin Minsky
Marvin Minsky's thoughts on the Fermi Paradox at the Transvisions 2007 conference
"Health, population and the human mind" Archived March 17, 2010, at the Wayback Machine: Marvin Minsky talk at the TED conference
"The Society of Mind" on MIT OpenCourseWare
Marvin Minsky tells his life story at Web of Stories (video)
Marvin Minsky Playlist Archived February 10, 2016, at the Wayback Machine Appearance on WMBR's Dinnertime Sampler Archived May 4, 2011, at the Wayback Machine radio show November 26, 2003
Oral history interview with Marvin Minsky at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Minsky describes artificial intelligence (AI) research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Topics include: the work of John McCarthy; changes in the MIT research laboratories with the advent of Project MAC; research in the areas of expert systems, graphics, word processing, and time-sharing; variations in the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) attitude toward AI.
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.
Appearances on C-SPAN