Marvin Minsky’s Legacy of Students and Ideas

by Susan Hassler,  IEEE Spectrum

The late computer science pioneer and ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Marvin Minsky left behind a wealth of ideas and scientists to whom he served as a teacher and inspiration, who are continuing his vaunted legacy with their own students.

He was a pioneering computer scientist, cognitive scientist, and roboticist, a fellow of IEEE and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of numerous honors and awards, among them the Turing Award, the IEEE Computer Society’s Computer Pioneer Award, and the Franklin Institute’s Benjamin Franklin Medal. He  co-founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Reading “Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence,” written in 1961 and published in the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers, it’s important to remember that the computers that sparked his inquiries then had mere kilobytes of memory.

Minsky’s research was in the pursuit of artificial intelligence (AI) that could really think, as opposed to computers having the semblance of thinking via their data-crunching abilities. “He saw the developments of the last few years as steps in the wrong direction,” says TTI/Vanguard director Steven Cherry. “Google and Facebook are exploiting their vast datasets, using deep learning. But Minsky saw this as achieving short-term gains at the expense of solving the real machine-intelligence problem.”

Minsky was aware of the dangers and challenges of AI that could learn like human beings, but he thought people would be able to contend with these challenges.  Read the article

DCL: I worked with McCarthy and Minsky at the AI Lab at MIT from 1959 – 1962. I took Minsky’s course in AI. And countless seminars run by the two of  them. But I stayed clear of doing a thesis with either McCarthy or Minsky. They were the world’s laziest teachers. In fact there is a story of the two of them never reading a student’s thesis until they were about to enter the room for the student’s  oral defense, and having the reaction outside the door of “Oh my god, we can’t possibly accept this…. what are we going to do?”  I seem to remember they accepted the thesis. But Marvin was certainly more diligent with students than McCarthy.  And I remember he was very thoughtful and gave good advice about what job offer I should accept when I was faced with returning to the UK to fulfill my Fulbright obligations.