Marvin Minsky quotes

Marvin Minsky was an American cognitive scientist and a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence. His groundbreaking work laid the foundation for much of modern AI research and robotics. He inspired generations of scientists and remains a key figure in the history of computer science. Here are 98 of his quotes:

You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way. (Marvin Minsky)
No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to 'discover' that – where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed. View quote
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. View quote
Marvin Minsky
In general we are least aware of what our minds do best. View quote
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." View quote
Marvin Minsky
An ethicist is someone who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind. View quote
Marvin Minsky
Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer. View quote
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. View quote
Marvin Minsky
Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children. View quote
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. View quote
Marvin Minsky
I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think that understanding spoils your experience... How would they know? (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. View quote
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! View quote
Marvin Minsky
Our culture has a universal myth in which we see emotion as more complex and obscure than intellect. Indeed, emotion might be "deeper" in some sense of prior evolution, but this need not make it harder to understand; in fact, I think today we actually know much more about emotion than about reason. View quote
Marvin Minsky
Old answers never perfectly suit new questions, except in the most formal, logical circumstances. View quote
Marvin Minsky
I maintain that attitudes do really precede propositions, feelings come before facts. View quote
Marvin Minsky
Hearing music is like viewing scenery and... when we hear good music our minds react in very much the same way they do when we see things. View quote
Marvin Minsky
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. View quote
Marvin Minsky
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. View quote
Marvin Minsky
When no idea seems right, the right one must seem wrong. View quote
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)
We'll show you that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself. View quote
Marvin Minsky
Logic doesn't apply to the real world. View quote
Marvin Minsky
If there's something you like very much 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. View quote
Marvin Minsky
I suspect our human "thinking processes" often "break down," but you rarely notice anything's wrong, because your systems so quickly switch you to think in different ways, while the systems that failed are repaired or replaced. View quote
Marvin Minsky

Marvin Minsky

Marvin Minsky - Image
Photo: Sethwoodworth at English Wikipedia, taken by Bcjordan, CC BY 3.0
Occupation: American Scientist
Born: August 9, 1927
Died: January 24, 2016
Quotes count: 98
Wikipedia: Marvin Minsky

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