#Marvin Minsky - Why the Society of Mind is crucial for understanding intelligence

[itsnothingbutluck]

The scientist, Marvin Minsky (1927-2016) was one of the pioneers of the field of Artificial Intelligence, having founded the MIT AI Lab in 1970. Since the 1950s, his work involved trying to uncover human thinking processes and replicate them in machines. [Listener: Christopher Sykes; date recorded: 2011] TRANSCRIPT: I think something like the Society of Mind theory is necessary if you’re going to try to understand anything like human intelligence. Just as you need some theory like that to understand any aspect of biology... 'cause consider any animal. An animal is made of organs, a liver and pancreas and stomach and lungs and heart. And each of those systems has evolved to be good at some particular way of doing something or some particular function or solving some particular problem. Of course, they’re all related to survival, but that doesn’t mean that the animal has a survival instinct. It’s a wonderful paradox. Many people say, well the important thing about a living thing is that it has a survival instinct. That’s why it eats, to stay alive. And that’s why it reproduces, so that the species... but there really isn’t any survival instinct. There’s just a collection of mechanisms, all of which help to solve problems in different situations. It seems to me that it’s the same with the mind. That in order to survive or whatever, you have to solve and deal with different situations. And each situation involves some collection of problems to solve. So, a successful animal or the product of an evolution is almost... when it’s successful, is to develop a society of different methods for dealing with situations.