Marvin Minsky

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Lore & Background

Marvin Minsky was born on August 9, 1927, into a Jewish family in New York City. His mother was Fannie (Reiser), a Zionist activist, and his father was Henry, an eye surgeon. He attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School and the Bronx High School of Science, then Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1944 to 1945 before earning an A.B. in mathematics from Harvard University (1950) and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University (1954). His doctoral dissertation was titled 'Theory of neural-analog reinforcement systems and its application to the brain-model problem.'

Minsky began his academic career as a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1954 to 1957. He joined the MIT faculty in 1958 and remained there until his death. He joined the staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1958; a year later, he and John McCarthy initiated what was, as of 2003, named the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His inventions include the first head-mounted graphical display (1963) and the confocal microscope (1957, a predecessor to today's widely used confocal laser scanning microscope). With Seymour Papert, he developed the first Logo programming language-driven 'turtle robot.' In 1951, Minsky built SNARC, which is often considered the first artificial neural network. In 1962, he worked on small universal Turing machines and published his well-known 7-state, 4-symbol machine. Minsky and Papert's book Perceptrons attacked the work of Frank Rosenblatt on Perceptrons and became the foundational work in the analysis of artificial neural networks. The book is controversial, as some claim it greatly discouraged research on neural networks in the 1970s and contributed to the so-called 'AI winter.' His paper 'A Framework for Representing Knowledge' created a new paradigm in knowledge representation. In the early 1970s, Minsky and Papert began to develop what came to be known as the Society of Mind theory, which describes intelligence as the possible product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. Minsky said that ideas for the theory came from his work in trying to create a machine that uses a robotic arm, a videocamera, and a computer to build with children's blocks. In 1986, he published The Society of Mind, a comprehensive book on the theory written for the general public. In 2006, he published The Emotion Machine, which critiques many popular theories of how the human mind works and suggests alternative theories. Minsky was an adviser to Stanley Kubrick on his movie 2001: A Space Odyssey; one of the movie's characters, Victor Kaminski, was named in Minsky's honor. Arthur C. Clarke's novel of the same name explicitly mentions Minsky, describing how in the 1980s Minsky and Good showed how artificial neural networks could be generated automatically. While working at Bell Labs in 1952, Minsky proposed a design for a useless machine he called the 'ultimate machine'—when switched on, a device emerges to switch it back off. Claude Shannon built the first working prototype. Minsky was an atheist and a signatory to the Scientists' Open Letter on Cryonics. He was a critic of the Loebner Prize for conversational robots. He cautioned that an artificial superintelligence designed to solve an innocuous mathematical problem might decide to assume control of Earth's resources to build supercomputers, but believed such scenarios are 'hard to take seriously' because he felt confident that AI would be well tested before being deployed. Minsky received a $100,000 research grant from Jeffrey Epstein in 2002, four years before Epstein's first arrest for sex offenses; it was the first from Epstein to MIT. Minsky received no further research grants from him. Minsky organized two academic symposia on Epstein's private island Little Saint James, one in 2002 and another in 2011, after Epstein was a registered sex offender. Virginia Roberts Giuffre said Epstein sent her to have sex with Minsky; Minsky's widow, Gloria Rudisch, has denied this. Minsky died in Boston, Massachusetts on January 24, 2016, aged 88. His family reported that he died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Minsky was a member of Alcor Life Extension Foundation's Scientific Advisory Board; Alcor will neither confirm nor deny that Minsky was cryonically preserved.

Reader's Guide

Marvin Minsky's significance lies in his foundational contributions to artificial intelligence, both as a researcher and as a co-founder of the field. His work on neural networks, including SNARC (often considered the first artificial neural network, built in 1951) and the critical analysis in Perceptrons (co-authored with Seymour Papert), shaped the trajectory of AI research, though the latter is noted for its controversial role in the so-called 'AI winter.' His theory of frames, introduced in his paper 'A Framework for Representing Knowledge,' created a new paradigm in knowledge representation. The Society of Mind theory, published in 1986, describes intelligence as the possible product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. Minsky's inventions, such as the confocal microscope (1957) and the first head-mounted graphical display (1963), demonstrate his interdisciplinary impact. His legacy is recognized through numerous awards: the ACM Turing Award in 1969, the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1982, the Japan Prize in 1990, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2001, and the Dan David Prize in 2014 (the 'Future'-oriented prize for 'Artificial Intelligence, the Digital Mind'). He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1973 and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 1989, and was inducted into IEEE Intelligent Systems' AI Hall of Fame in 2011. His cautionary views on artificial superintelligence and his critique of the Loebner Prize reflect his nuanced perspective on AI's future. Minsky's work continues to inform debates in cognitive science, robotics, and AI ethics.

Did You Know?

• Minsky built SNARC in 1951, which is often considered the first artificial neural network.
• He invented the confocal microscope in 1957, a predecessor to today's widely used confocal laser scanning microscope.
• Minsky proposed a 'useless machine' in 1952 that switches itself off; Claude Shannon built the first working prototype.
• He was an adviser to Stanley Kubrick on the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Arthur C. Clarke's novel mentions Minsky by name.
• Minsky received the ACM Turing Award in 1969, the Japan Prize in 1990, and the Dan David Prize in 2014.