Conducted by Renato M.E. Sabbatini, PhD, Associate Editor, Brain & Mind Magazine

The mind, artificial intelligence and emotions

Interview with Marvin Minsky

Conducted by Renato M.E. Sabbatini, PhD, Associate Editor, Brain & Mind Magazine

Marvin Minsky is respected as one of foremost researchers and writers in many fields of the Computer Sciences, particularly in Artificial Intelligence, the area which studies ways of imitating the human brain’s cognitive functions in a computer. As a professor with the prestigious Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Cambridge, USA, he founded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a place where many of the ground-breaking research projects in computer sciences have occurred and still occur, such as the development of programming languages LISP and LOGO. He’s is one of the founders of robotics and is the recipient of a number of awards and honors, such as the Turing Award, which is considered the Nobel of computing. He also participates in the renowned MIT Media Lab, where the media of the future are being researched.

Due to the many points of contact and interaction between the neurosciences, psychology and computer sciences in the area of Artificial Intelligence, it’s no wonder that the genial mind of Prof. Minsky soon turned to the commonalities and interfaces between both and started to write about the brain and its product, the mind. His "opus magnum" in this area has been a fascinating book, "TheSociety of Mind", which has been translated to many languages,including Portuguese, and which has a number of interesting theories about the organization and workings of the mind. His interest in the area is a long standing one: the first electrical realization of a artificial neural network was made by Minsky while a student. He has even written anovel about building a super-intelligence in 2023 A.D, titled "The Turing Option", in 1991.

Prof. Minsky visited São Paulo for his fourth time last May 1998, as invited speaker to Inet’98,a conference on intelligent technologies and networking. During three grueling days, we had the opportunity, as the president of the scientific committee of the conference, to accompany the indefatigable professor (despite his age) in an unending round of press interviews and conferences; as well as to ask many questions of ours. He tremendously impressed us with his intelligence, depth of thinking and originality of ideas, and with his personality. The result is a patchwork of a interview, patched from severalquestions in different settings and times, which we present here for the delight of the reader, who will undoubtedly be mesmerized by the brilliant mind of Marvin Minsky and his many original (and some say, outrageous) ideas and catch phrases.

The Interview

Date: 2016-01-05; view: 1008