Books, records, coffee cups, bric-a-brac and memorabilia cover every square inch of space. Not walls and shelves, mind you. The floor. There's just enough of a path for inhabitants to move between rooms and get to the door.
Welcome to the home of Marvin Minsky, the Harvard University- and Princeton University-educated mathematician who has become the signature thinker about thinking among American academics. From his professorships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his name has become synonymous with the advance of artificial intelligence implemented in computers and other devices. His thinking has strongly influenced the creation of networks that work like brains, the representation of knowledge in symbols and semantics, the perception of environments in machines and the development of intelligent robots.
In the early 1970s, he and Seymour Papert, co-founder with Minsky of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, began formulating a theory called "The Society of Mind," which proposed that intelligence is not a state of being or a single sequence of logical thought, but the result of an untold number of interacting processes.
In 1985, Minsky published his best-known work, called Society of Mind, in which he described the way humans unconsciously manage the interaction of small armies of agents in their minds to achieve thought and action. It sounds cluttered and messy - akin to how he keeps his house. Nothing gets discarded, everything stands ready for recall and reuse. And the armies of agents always find a way to get where they need to go.
The idea was considered a conceptual breakthrough at the time.
Later this year, Minsky will publish the sequel to Society of Mind, in which he tries to achieve a similar breakthrough in how humans think about the emotions they feel - and use. Minsky sat down with Ziff Davis Internet Chief Content Officer Tom Steinert-Threlkeld to talk about his next work, The Emotion Machine.
