The Frontiers of Knowledge laureate in Information and Communication
Technologies will pick up his award today in the BBVA Foundation
Marvin Minsky: “We should concentrate on
studying the brains of simpler animals, like
dragonflies”

For Minsky, honored for his founding role in artificial intelligence, the
reason the area is advancing so slowly is the lack of support for “young
people with good ideas”

“What are people but highly evolved machines?,” asks Minsky, who
remains convinced that machine intelligence will one day surpass that
of humans

In the view of the jury, the artificial intelligence field that Minsky helped
launch, has contributed decisively to enlarging the role of computers –
from calculating machines to universal machines – and facilitating more
intuitive forms of interaction between people and computerized devices.
Madrid, June 16, 2014.- Marvin Minsky, winner of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of
Knowledge Award in the Information and Communication Technologies category
for his founding role in artificial intelligence, considers it “a sheer waste of time” to
invest effort and resources on major programs investigating the human brain, like
those under way in the U.S. and European Union. “What we should do is study the
brains of simpler animals, like a dragonfly, for instance”.
Minsky, aged 87, currently Professor Emeritus of Professor of Electrical Engineering
and Computer Science at MIT, will pick up his award this evening at a ceremony
in the BBVA Foundation’s Madrid headquarters, in recognition of his role in
creating the artificial intelligence field. The scientist, says the jury, has worked “on
systems integrating robotics, language, perception and planning,” and his
developments on these and other fronts “have shaped the field of artificial
intelligence.”
“Few people embody the spirit of the Frontiers of Knowledge Awards like Marvin
Minsky, who has not only created a new field but has also nurtured its progress
through the decades,” observed Rafael Pardo, Director of the BBVA Foundation
at yesterday’s press call.
Minsky expounded his view that large research programs into the workings of the
human brain are not worth the effort: “Let’s have a thousand projects with one
million dollars for some young person to do significant research, and not pour
billions of dollars into a single project studying the human brain,” he protests.
“Because the people leading that project do not know what to look for”.
He also stands by his vision of the human brain as essentially a “meat machine”:
“What are people if not highly evolved machines?”, he asked at the press call.
And remains as convinced as ever that machine intelligence will eventually
surpass that of humans.
But artificial intelligence has progressed little and slowly compared to its initial
promise, and one of the reasons, Minsky argues, is the lack of support for basic
research. “There was a great acceleration of research on artificial intelligence
from the 1950s through to the 1980s”, he points out, but after this “golden age”, as
he calls it, “university research slowed right down.”
Minsky also pointed out the “great paradox” that artificial intelligence and
computer science in general thrived under the aegis of the military research
program, which after the Second World War had huge amounts of money and
very few restraints. Exactly “the opposite of civilian research,” where researchers,
he contends, are under pressure to produce quick results in order to justify the
money spent. So military research ended up being “freer and more imaginative”
than its civilian equivalent.
To get the field back on track, his recipe is to “give more help to people with
good ideas,” especially young people, who find it impossible to get long-term
appointments. “Many institutions say they support independent research, but most
actually get in its way.”
Asked about the dangers of tomorrow’s hypothetical intelligent machines, Minsky
argues that “any new system can suffer accidents, especially at the start.
Everyone understands that progress involves certain risks. It’s a question of the
trade-off between future advantage and present disadvantage. As a society we
have to have rules to prevent some people taking risks that are too large for
others to bear.” And he adds: “If you want a better answer, ask your favorite
politician. And good luck.”
Last February, after being informed of the award, Minsky drew comparisons
between how fast humans and machines are able to evolve: “The intelligence of
computers will keep increasing, and in each aspect of cognition and life,
problem-solving and understanding, [the machines] will only get better. People
will also get a little better, but the problem with people is that when someone
becomes very good at a certain skill, and that person dies, the skill is lost, because
we don’t have an explicit representation yet of how a human brain does
complicated tasks.”
Basic and applied contributions
Minsky is a mathematician, but has chosen to spend most of his time exploring
other terrains, because, he claims, he met so many mathematicians better than
himself. In his varied career, he has alternated basic or fundamental contributions
with others of an applied nature, in a spectrum of fields that spans mathematics,
cognitive science, robotics and philosophy.
What finally awakened his ambition to construct thinking machines was his
fascination for the human brain and an encounter with a book – Mathematical
Biophysics by Nicolas Rashevsky – which mathematically described the workings
of biological systems. His PhD thesis, which he defended at Princeton University in
1954, explored how to construct neural networks capable of learning.
Just two years later, artificial intelligence officially came into being as a discipline
at a computer science conference in Dartmouth College (New Hampshire, United
States), with Minsky, John McCarthy, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon as its
architects.
Within the field, Minsky has led the quest to endow computers with common
sense, the challenge being how to teach a computer what comes easily to the
youngest child. “We rarely recognize how wonderful it is that a person can
traverse an entire lifetime without making a really serious mistake, like putting a
fork in one’s eye or using a window instead of a door,” writes Minsky in one of his
best-known books, The Society of Mind.
In 1959, Minsky joined the faculty at MIT, where he and McCarthy co-founded the
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His curriculum was by then already rich in
practical achievements: the first neural network learning machine, SNARC, a
device made out of vacuum tubes (1951); and the confocal scanning
microscope (1955), still widely used in biology for its ability to reconstruct 3D
images. And the list would continue with new contributions like the first headmounted graphical display (1963); a robotic arm (1967), now on show at Boston’s
Museum of Science; or a small computer-controlled robot, the LOGO “turtle”
(1972), which draws as it moves.
From there, he would go on to publish his great conceptual contributions. In 1974,
his theory of frames postulated that knowledge can be represented by previously
acquired stereotypes or ‘frames’. In 1987’s The Society of Mind, he argued that
intelligence arises from the interaction of myriad non-intelligent parts. And in The
Emotion Machine (2006) he characterized emotions as simply the product of a
different level of mental processing, another way of solving problems.
But Minsky’s creativity has not been confined solely to the lab: a keen fan of
science fiction, he was an advisor to Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968) and gave Michael Crichton the underlying idea for Jurassic Park (1990).
Although the goal of an intelligent machine may still be a long way off, many
experts acknowledge that artificial intelligence has contributed much of the
thought behind the computer as we know it, the first universal, ubiquitous machine
that we can interact with intuitively.
In the closing words of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards jury,
“Minsky’s high-impact contributions have inspired researchers all over the world.”
For more information, contact the BBVA Foundation Communication Department (+34 91
374 5210 / +34 91 537 3769, comunicacion@fbbva.es) or visit www.fbbva.es