I had "conversations" with Minksy in Internet Discussion Groups similar to this one. Even though he was famously not a believer and I am we came to an agreement that strong AI could be taken as proof of evolution or of intelligent design.
Jim Bromer On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 2:36 PM, EdFromNH . <[email protected]> wrote: > I did a year long independent study under Minsky my senior year at Harvard > in 1969-70. He basically gave me a long reading list and made me promise > to read every word of it and never bother him again. I did both. 1969 was > the year Minsky supposedly showed that connectionist architectures were a > dead end (his paper's was actually narrower than that, but its effect on > government funding of connectionism was not). But despite Minsky's > supposed condemnation of connectionism, the reading list he gave me > included a fair amount about neural nets, and was largely about brain > science (which I viewed as connectionist). The most important single paper > I read in the reading list was a brief 4-5 page mimeograph of a typewritten > article by Minsky on K-Line theory. (I assumed for years that K-Line was > Minsky's idea, but Deb Roy of MIT's Media Lab told me in the early 2000's > that someone beside Minsky originated it.) K-Line theory is a very simple, > but powerful, model of a mind. It assumes the mind constantly receives > sequential sensory information, records that sequential information, and as > it does so it matches that information against past recorded sequences. As > it does, it activates the more closely matching recordings, and generates > from them, I assumed through generalization, the probable implications of > the currently received information. For example, this let me understand in > 1969 how it would actually be rather easy for a massively parallel K-Line > machine to generate a sense of intuition, something that a considerable > number of people in AI viewed as totally unexplainable for decades after > that time. The other most important information I got from Minsky's > reading list was just what a powerful, massively parallel, complex > supercomputer the human brain was. In 1969 Minsky had been quoted as > saying computers would be more intelligent than humans within several > years. Because I understood what a supercomputer the brain was, and > because my interpretation of K-Line theory required a computer with > computational power somewhat approaching that of the brain, I believed then > that machines with the intellect of humans would not be made until the > power of computers was somewhere very roughly in the teraopp ranges, > something that was many years away at that time. But I agreed with Minsky > that artificial intelligence was totally doable, once the necessary > computing power arrived -- which it very arguably has now. > > So, I owe a great intellectual debt to Minsky. > > On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 3:21 AM, Keyvan Mir Mohammad Sadeghi < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> https://www.csail.mit.edu/node/2682 >> >> -- >> Keyvan Mir Mohammad Sadeghi >> MSc AI >> *AGI* | Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> >> <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/8630185-a57a74e1> | >> Modify <https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;> Your Subscription >> <http://www.listbox.com> >> > > *AGI* | Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> > <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/24379807-653794b5> | > Modify > <https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;> > Your Subscription <http://www.listbox.com> > ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
