Marvin Minsky Quotes

60 quotes in 990 categories

• I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think that understanding spoils your experience... How would they know?
• It's ridiculous to live 100 years and only be able to remember 30 million bytes. You know, less than a compact disc. The human condition…
• But just as astronomy succeeded astrology, following Kepler's discovery of planetary regularities, the discoveries of these many principles in empirical explorations of intellectual processes in…
• Minds are simply what brains do.
• The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.
• You don't understand anything unless you understand there are at least 3 ways.
• I bet the human brain is a kludge
• 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…
• Logic doesn't apply to the real world.
• Kubrick's vision seemed to be that humans are doomed, whereas Clarke's is that humans are moving on to a better stage of evolution.
• General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.
• In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best.
• A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible.…
• Within 10 years computers won't even keep us as pets.
• An ethicist is someone who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind.
• Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.
• Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days.
• What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from…
• Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas - of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions,…
• But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does what it is works but what it does when it's stuck.

Browse Marvin Minsky Quotes by Category