Minsky received many accolades and honors, including the 1969 ACMTuring Award. He is one of the people, most notably includingJohn McCarthy, who have been considered "fathers of AI",[16] specifically due to his participation in the 1956Dartmouth workshop that started Artificial Intelligence as an academic field.
Minsky and Papert's bookPerceptrons attacked the work ofFrank Rosenblatt on Perceptrons and became the foundational work in the analysis ofartificial neural networks. The book is the center of a controversy in the history of AI, as some claim it greatly discouraged research on neural networks in the 1970s and contributed to the so-called "AI winter".[28] Minsky also founded several other AI models. His paper "A framework for representing knowledge"[29] created a new paradigm in knowledge representation.Perceptrons is now more a historical than practical book, but the theory of frames is in wide use.[30] Minsky also wrote of the possibility thatextraterrestrial life may think like humans, thus permitting communication.[31]
In the early 1970s, at theMIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, Minsky and Papert started developing what came to be known as theSociety of Mind theory. The theory attempts to explain how what we call intelligence could be a product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. Minsky says that the biggest source of 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 publishedThe Society of Mind, a comprehensive book on the theory which, unlike most of his previously published work, was written for the general public.
The MA-3 Robotic Manipulator Arm, on display atMIT Museum
General view
The Belgrade Hand
In 2006, Minsky publishedThe Emotion Machine, a book that critiques many popular theories of how human minds work and suggests alternative theories, often replacing simple ideas with more complex ones.[32]
Minsky also invented a "gravity machine" that will ring a bell if thegravitational constant changes, a theoretical possibility that is not expected to occur in the foreseeable future.[7]
Minsky was an adviser[33] onStanley Kubrick's movie2001: A Space Odyssey; one of the movie's characters, Victor Kaminski, was named in Minsky's honor.[34] Minsky is mentioned explicitly inArthur C. Clarke's novel of the same name, where he is portrayed as achieving a crucial breakthrough in artificial intelligence in the then-future 1980s, paving the way forHAL 9000 in the early 21st century:
In the 1980s, Minsky andGood had shown howartificial neural networks could be generated automatically—self replicated—in accordance with any arbitrary learning program. Artificial brains could be grown by a process strikingly analogous to the development of a human brain. In any given case, the precise details would never be known, and even if they were, they would be millions of times too complex for human understanding.[35]
In "The Law of Non-Contradiction", episode 3 of the television anthology seriesFargo (Season 3), at least two allusions to Minsky are made. The first is through the depiction of a "useless machine": a device Minsky invented as a philosophical joke.Claude Shannon, Minsky's mentor at Bell Labs, built the first working prototype of this machine.[36] The second is through the depiction of an animation of a robot called "minsky"—a character in the sci-fi novelThe Planet Wyh.
In 1952, Minsky married pediatrician Gloria Rudisch; together they had three children.[37] Minsky was a talented improvisational pianist[38] who published musings on the relations betweenmusic and psychology.
Minsky was an atheist.[39] He was a signatory to the Scientists' Open Letter onCryonics.[40]
He was a critic of theLoebner Prize for conversational robots,[41] and argued that a fundamental difference betweenhumans andmachines is that while humans are machines, they are machines in which intelligence emerges from the interplay of the many unintelligent but semi-autonomous agents the brain comprises.[42] He argued that "somewhere down the line, some computers will become more intelligent than most people", but that it was very hard to predict how fast progress would be.[43] He cautioned that an artificialsuperintelligence designed to solve an innocuous mathematical problem might decide toassume control of Earth's resources to build supercomputers to help achieve its goal,[44] but believed that such scenarios are "hard to take seriously" because he felt confident that AI would be well tested before being deployed.[45]
Minsky received a $100,000 research grant fromJeffrey 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.[46][47]
Minsky organized two academic symposia on Epstein's private islandLittle Saint James, one in 2002 and another in 2011, after Epstein was a registered sex offender.[48]Virginia Roberts Giuffre said Epstein sent her to have sex with Minsky;[49] Minsky's widow, Gloria Rudisch, has denied this.[50]
^The patent for Minsky's Microscopy Apparatus was applied for in 1957, and subsequently granted US Patent Number 3,013,467 in 1961. According to his published biography on the MIT Media Lab webpage, "In 1956, when a Junior Fellow at Harvard, Minsky invented and built the first Confocal Scanning Microscope, an optical instrument with unprecedented resolution and image quality".
^Hillis, Danny;McCarthy, John; Mitchell, Tom M.; Mueller, Erik T.; Riecken, Doug; Sloman, Aaron; Winston, Patrick Henry (2007). "In Honor of Marvin Minsky's Contributions on his 80th Birthday".AI Magazine.28 (4): 109.doi:10.1609/aimag.v28i4.2064.
^Minsky, Marvin Lee (1986).The Society of Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster.ISBN978-0-671-60740-1. The first comprehensive description of the Society of Mind theory of intellectual structure and development. See alsoThe Society of Mind (CD-ROM version), Voyager, 1996.
^Minsky, Marvin Lee (2007).The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster.ISBN978-0-7432-7664-1.
^Turlough Neary, Damien Woods, "Small Weakly Universal Turing Machines",Machines, Computations, and Universality 2007,proceedings, Orleans, France, September 10–13, 2007,ISBN3540745920, p. 262-263
^Minsky, M. (1975). A framework for representing knowledge. In P. H. Winston (Ed.), The psychology of computer vision. New York: McGraw-Hill Book.
^"Minsky's frame system theory".Proceedings of the 1975 workshop on Theoretical issues in natural language processing – TINLAP '75. 1975. pp. 104–116.doi:10.3115/980190.980222.S2CID1870840.
^Lederman, Leon M.; Scheppler, Judith A. (2001)."Marvin Minsky: Mind Maker".Portraits of Great American Scientists. Prometheus Books. p. 74.ISBN9781573929325.Another area where he "goes against the flow" is in his spiritual beliefs. As far as religion is concerned, he's a confirmed atheist. "I think it [religion] is a contagious mental disease. ... The brain has a need to believe it knows a reason for things.
^Russell, Stuart J.;Norvig, Peter (2003). "Section 26.3: The Ethics and Risks of Developing Artificial Intelligence".Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall.ISBN978-0137903955.Similarly, Marvin Minsky once suggested that an AI program designed to solve the Riemann Hypothesis might end up taking over all the resources of Earth to build more powerful supercomputers to help achieve its goal.
^Giuffre, Virginia (2025).Nobody's Girl. Knopf. p. 229.Epstein sent me to a cabana on the beach and told me to service the man inside. I will never forget Minsky's bald head, and the way his face seemed to have shriveled like one of those folk-art dolls whose heads are dried-up apples. Throughout my time having sex with Minsky, I could hear the waves lapping outside the little room. I tried to focus only on that sound.
Oral history interview with Terry Winograd at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Winograd describes his work in computer science, linguistics, and artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), discussing the work of Marvin Minsky and others.
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