On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 6:03 AM John Rose <[email protected]> wrote:
> There may have been physics envy then since the technological convergence > of AIT and QIT had yet to materialize. > The "physics envy" trope is an excuse for being unprincipled while occupying positions of trust, power, privilege, responsibility and/or authority. Minsky had a life-long habit of being unprincipled while occupying a position of trust, power, privilege, responsibility and/or authority. This goes back, at least, with the conclusion of the book "Perceptrons" which started the first connectionist winter. After my colleague, Charles Sinclare Smith, managed to end that first winter when he took control of the Systems Development Foundation's endowment and financed the early work of Hinton, Werbos, Rumelhart, MacLelland, etc. Minsky had the gaul to get up in front of the 2nd IJCNN -- a time when those of us struggling to rekindle neural network research had finally overcome Minsky's first connectionist winter -- and address us plenary regarding his unprincipled "society of mind". I was among those who walked out when he took the stage. Although AFAIK Minsky didn't have a hand in the second connectionist winter, his 2007 invocation of "physics envy" came at a time when it was ending based primarily on Hinton's exploitation of hardware advances. I see Minsky's 2014 admission as a deathbed confession. As far as I'm concerned, he redeemed himself at least to the extent that people he had misled throughout his life heard it. Epstein? Do we *really* need to go there? ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T07361bd0216a4e97-Mfe61f3830d58c682820caf3a Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
