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:

No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to 'discover' that – where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed.

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

In general we are least aware of what our minds do best.

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

An ethicist is someone who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind.

Marvin Minsky

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

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

Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.

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

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

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

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.

Marvin Minsky

Old answers never perfectly suit new questions, except in the most formal, logical circumstances.

Marvin Minsky

I maintain that attitudes do really precede propositions, feelings come before facts.

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.

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.

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.

Marvin Minsky

When no idea seems right, the right one must seem wrong.

Marvin Minsky

We'll show you that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.

Marvin Minsky

Logic doesn't apply to the real world.

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.

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.

Marvin Minsky