Marvin Minsky interview

I just stumbled upon an interview with AI pioneer Marvin Minsky. The interview is mostly about his new book The emotion machine, "a machine that can switch between all the different kinds of thinking". I definitely want to read this book.

It's clear that Marvin Minsky has some profoundly different views on what AI should be like. He complains that the field is focused on solving problems with brain models and statistic models, but hardly no-one is working on making systems that can reason by analogy, or in other terms, think like a human.

He also talks about a bit about scifi, and if you are into that you will love this quote from the interview: "General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else." I really laughed when I read it (because there is so much truth to it).