117 Quotes by Marvin Minsky

But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does what it is works but what it does when it’s stuck.

But just as astronomy succeeded astrology, following Kepler’s discovery of planetary regularities, the discoveries of these many principles in empirical explorations of intellectual processes in machines should lead to a science, eventually.

Kubrick’s vision seemed to be that humans are doomed, whereas Clarke’s is that humans are moving on to a better stage of evolution.

Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children’s thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.

All intelligent problem solvers are subject to the same ultimate constraints – limitations on space, time, and materials.

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.

We turn to quantities when we can’t compare the qualities of things.

The degree of intelligence that a man or a machine can show depends on many qualities of the ways that knowledge, goals, and problem-solving techniques are represented and put together, and not so much on the fine details.

Sometimes a problem will seem completely insurmountable. Then someone comes up with a simple new idea, or just a rearrangement of old ideas, that completely eliminates it.