Minsky, Marvin

Marvin is a legendary founder of the field of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder and long-time director of MIT’s world-renowned Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He has been on the MIT faculty since 1958, making contributions to AI, cognitive psychology, mathematics, computational linguistics, robotics, machine perception, and knowledge representation. In recent years he has worked chiefly on imparting to machines the human capacity for commonsense reasoning. In the early 1970s at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, Marvin and Seymour Papert started developing what came to be called 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. Marvin says that the biggest source of ideas about the theory came from his work in trying to create a machine that uses a robotic arm, a video camera, and a computer to build with children's blocks. In 1986 Minsky published a comprehensive book on the theory with the same title, The Society of Mind, which, unlike most of his previously published work, was written for a general audience. 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. Issac Asimov once described Marvin as one of only two people he ever met who was flat out smarter than himself (the other being Carl Sagan). Ray Kurzweil considers Marvin his mentor.