Artificial Intelligence Got Stuck For A Moment - An Interview with Marvin MinskyDr. Marvin Minsky is Thoshiba professor of media arts
and sciences and professor of electrical engineering and
computer sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and one of the world's leading theorists of artivicial intelligence.
In the late 1950s, Mr. Minsky and John McCarthy, a professor
of computer science at Stanford University, founded a program
that would evolve into the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
In addition to inventing and building thinking machines,
Mr. Minsky wrote the classic "The Society of Mind"
(Simon & Schuster, 1986), in which he tries to show
how intelligence works, and he is working on a sequel. He
spoke recently with Claudia Dreifus of The New York Times.
(Source: International Herald Tribune, August 1998)
In the 1960s, science students,
particularly those at MIT, talked of artificial intelligence,
or AI, as if it would create world revolution. Were they
too optimistic?
A. Well, it got stuck. AI was able to produce all kinds
of wonderful things .. . programs that did better than the
average stockbroker or portfolio manager, programs that
could fix some piece of equipment. Around 1980, progress
stopped in some ways and people went off in a number of
other directions to try to find some way to get back. It
stopped because we'd done the easy things. In the eye of
eternity, it got stuck for a moment. A good example is,
in 1964 or 1965 one of our students, Daniel Bobrow, worte
a program that could read a question from a high school
algebra book and, sometimes, solve the problem. So it could
figure out a little bit of language and algebra. It didn't
get
How do you define common
sense?
A. Common sense is knowing maybe 30 or 60 million things
about the world and having them represented so that when
something happens, you can make anologies with others. If
you have common sense you don't classify the things literally;
you store them by what they are useful for or what they
remind us of. For instance, I can see that suitcase as something
to stand on to change a light bulb as opposed to something
to carry things in
Could you get machines
to the point where they can deal with the intangibles of
humanness?
A. It's very tangible, what I'm talking about.
For example, you can push something with a stick, but you
can't pull it. You can pull something with a string, but
you can't push it. That's common sense. And no computer
knows it. Right now, I'm writing a book, a sequel
to "The Society of Mind", and I am looking at
some of this.
What is pain? What is common sense? What is
falling in love?
What is love?
A. Well, what are emotions? Emotions are big switches, and
there are hundreds of these. If you look at a book about
the brain, the brain just looks like switches ...... You
can think of the brain as a big supermarket of goodies that
you can use for different purpose. Falling in love is turning
on some 20 or 30 of these and turning a lot of the others
off. It's some particular arrangement. To understand it,
one has to get some theory of what are the resources in
the brain, what kind of arrangements are compatible and
what happens when you turn several on and they get into
conflict.
In the 1968 Stanley Kubrick film "2001:
A Space Odyssey", a computer named HAL developed a
lethal jealousy of his space companion, a human astronaut.
How far are we away from a jealous machine?
A. We could be five minutes from it, but it would be so
stupid that we couldn't tell.
Though HAL is Fiction, why shouldn't he be jealous? There's
an argument between my friend John MacCarthy and me because
he thinks you could make smart machines that don't have
any humanlike emotions. But I think you'are going to have
to go to great lengths to prevent them from having some
acquisitiveness and the need to control things.
Where were Stanley Kubrick and his co-author,
Arthur C. Clarke, right with their "2001: Space Odyssey"
predictions?
A. On just about everything except for the date. It's quite
a remarkable piece.>
When you go to the movies, what do you see?
A. "Terminator," "Total Recall", which
had ideas about implanted memory. Pretty clumsy, but I loved
the engineering. I don't like movies exactly. One of my
rules is not to think of the whole thing as having any unity.
The idea of liking a whole movie is ..... People have this
idea that they have to like something or not.
What do you read? A. Science fiction.
Do you read sciene
fiction in the way spies read spy novels - for ideas? A. Yes. There are dozen very, very
rich source of ideas out there. Gregory Benford of UC Irvine,
David Brin, Larry Niven are the best wirters of our period.
When they write a book, there's some big new idea about
something.
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