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How Hard Is It To Build An Intelligent Machine? I Don't Think It's So Hard, But That's My Opinion, And I've Written Two Books On How I Think One Should Do It. The Basic Idea I Promote Is That You Mustn't Look For A Magic Bullet. You Mustn't Look For One Wonderful Way To Solve All Problems. Instead You Want To Look For 20 Or 30 Ways To Solve Different Kinds Of Problems. And To Build Some Kind Of Higher Administrative Device That Figures Out What Kind Of Problem You Have And What Method To Use.

-Marvin Minsky

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How Hard Is It

Marvin Minsky

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How Hard Is It To Build An Intelligent Machine? I Don't Think It's So Hard, But That's My Opinion, And I've Written Two Books On How I Think One Should Do It. The Basic Idea I Promote Is That You Mustn't Look For A Magic Bullet. You Mustn't Look For One Wonderful Way To Solve All Problems. Instead You Want To Look For 20 Or 30 Ways To Solve Different Kinds Of Problems. And To Build Some Kind Of Higher Administrative Device That Figures Out What Kind Of Problem You Have And What Method To Use.

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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.

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Each Part Of The Mind Sees Only A Little Of What Happens In Some Others, And That Little Is Swiftly Refined, Reformulated And "represented." We Like To Believe That These Fragments Have Meanings In Themselves - Apart From The Great Webs Of Structure From Which They Emerge - And Indeed This Illusion Is Valuable To Us Qua Thinkers - But Not To Us As Psychologists - Because It Leads Us To Think That Expressible Knowledge Is The First Thing To Study.

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.

Listening To Music Engages The Previously Acquired Personal Knowledge Of The Listener.

Personal Knowledge

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Minds Are Simply What Brains Do.

We Turn To Quantities When We Can't Compare The Qualities Of Things.

You Don't Understand Anything Unless You Understand There Are At Least 3 Ways.

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.

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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.

How Hard Is It To Build An Intelligent Machine? I Don't Think It's So Hard, But That's My Opinion, And I've Written Two Books On How I Think One Should Do It. The Basic Idea I Promote Is That You Mustn't Look For A Magic Bullet. You Mustn't Look For One Wonderful Way To Solve All Problems. Instead You Want To Look For 20 Or 30 Ways To Solve Different Kinds Of Problems. And To Build Some Kind Of Higher Administrative Device That Figures Out What Kind Of Problem You Have And What Method To Use.

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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.

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!

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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