Marvin Minsky

“Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!”

“There was a failure to recognize the deep problems in AI; for instance, those captured in Blocks World. The people building physical robots learned nothing.”

“With the appearance of communications networks and interconnected computers, we got the world wide web, and it changed the lives of most people, I think.”

“We wanted to solve robot problems and needed some vision, action, reasoning, planning, and so forth. We even used some structural learning, such as was being explored by Patrick Winston.”

“When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation; he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems.”

“I started working at a point in history when digital computers were becoming mature, and before that, there were no such machines.”