An AI pioneer once designed a machine whose only job was switching itself off
In 1952 Marvin Minsky sketched the ultimate machine: flip its switch and a mechanical hand pops out to flip it back. His mentor Claude Shannon built one, and Arthur C. Clarke found it unspeakably sinister. The same restless mind helped found artificial intelligence and argued that minds are built from mindless parts.
Born in New York City on 9 August 1927, Minsky served in the US Navy in 1944 and 1945, then took a mathematics degree at Harvard in 1950 and a doctorate at Princeton in 1954 on neural-analog reinforcement systems. In 1951 he built SNARC, often regarded as the first artificial neural network. He joined MIT in 1958 and stayed for the rest of his career, and in 1959 he and John McCarthy started the lab that became MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. For taking part in the Dartmouth workshop, he, McCarthy, Shannon and Nathaniel Rochester are called the fathers of AI.
He was also a prolific inventor. He devised the confocal microscope in 1957, forerunner of today's laser scanning versions, and the first head-mounted graphical display in 1963. With Seymour Papert he built the first turtle robot driven by the Logo language. He even proposed a gravity machine that would ring a bell if the gravitational constant ever changed.
His ideas shaped the field, sometimes painfully. The 1969 book Perceptrons, written with Papert, critiqued Frank Rosenblatt's neural networks so sharply that some say it discouraged such research in the 1970s and fed the so-called AI winter; it is now seen as more historical than practical. His frames paper offered a new way to represent knowledge. From the early 1970s he and Papert developed the Society of Mind theory, which treats intelligence as emerging from many unintelligent agents interacting; he said it grew from trying to make a robot arm and camera build with children's blocks. The 1986 book on it was written for general readers.
Minsky advised Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey, and won the Turing Award in 1969 and the Japan Prize in 1990. He predicted that some computers would eventually outthink most people, while saying the pace was hard to forecast. His record also includes a 2002 research grant from Jeffrey Epstein and symposia held on Epstein's island. He died in Boston on 24 January 2016, aged 88.
Source: Marvin Minsky
