Death of Marvin Minsky: Artificial Intelligence in Science -Fiction – Photo 1
In 2013, Marvin Minsky was one of the few world-renowned experts invited to New York, the United States, for the Global Future 2045 Congress by Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov. Born in 1927 in the same city a surgeon specializing in ophthalmology father, he was present as one of the leading pioneers of artificial intelligence in the twentieth th century. One of the central themes of the conference focused on the nature of consciousness and the ability to achieve immortality by downloading to a computer. Not surprisingly, Ray Kurzweil was present – he was an alumni of Marvin Minsky at MIT ( Massachusetts Institute of Technology ). Obviously, Roger Penrose and Ken Hayworth were also invited as lecturers. The Congress of New York so overrated clearly the wave of transhumanism, some say science fiction and New Age pseudoscience. Marvin Minsky, a supporter of cryonics, unfortunately just died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 88, Sunday, January 24, 2016. He will undoubtedly marked his time with one of the most singular intellectual trajectories but also, probably, more features last century.
A child prodigy, Marvin Minsky was fascinated from an early age for electronics, science and science fiction that allows to reflect on the future of humanity. He attended the same private school as Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, a pioneer in the physical neutron stars and black holes. Just as the future Nobel Prize in physics Leon Lederman, he was drafted into the army during the Second World War. When he came out, he went to Harvard and Princeton, where he landed a doctorate in mathematics. There also met Albert Einstein, with whom he lunched, but above all, he had the opportunity to talk frequently with John von Neumann, one of the founders of the theory of computers and one of the first to reflect with Alan Turing on brain function and the nature of intelligence by comparing them to those machines.
What future for the human mind? Is the download of consciousness the key to immortality? Marvin Minsky tells us some thoughts on the subject and on artificial intelligence. For a fairly faithful translation into French, click on the rectangle with two horizontal bars at the bottom right. Subtitles in English should then appear if this is not already the case. Then clicking on the nut to the right of the rectangle, you should see the phrase “Translate subtitles”. Click to display the choice of language menu, select “French” and click “OK”. © 2045 Initiative, YouTube
From learning to artificial emotions
The rest of the prolific and varied career of Marvin Minsky (he was also accomplished pianist and inventor in 1956 of confocal microscopy, widely used today in biology and in materials science) will be mostly devoted to the mysteries of the mind and human consciousness, he considered as the deepest and most important, in order to reproduce them with machines. This will notably lead him to realize in 1951 the first neural network simulator before joining in 1958 the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. In 1959 he co-founded it with his colleague John McCarthy, who is credited with coining the term “artificial intelligence”, the MIT Artificial Intelligence Project which later became the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory .
This laboratory will have a considerable influence on the development of IT and its actors. He will participate in the creation of Arpanet, the precursor of the Internet and affect the development of the idea of open source for software. Articles and books Marvin Minsky will also have much influence. One can quote in this regard the 1960 article Steps Toward artificial intelligence and his famous work The Society of the Spirit (Society of Mind) in which he tries to explain how the mind works and how intelligence can be built. In a later book, The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of the Human Mind , he outlined his ideas in 2006 on how to go about it would provide intelligence artificial emotional states.
Conversely, a book published in 1969 with his colleague Seymour Papert had led to think that neural networks would lead to an impasse in the field of artificial intelligence, with an almost fatal blow to this area of research. Yet today it is flourishing with the work on machine learning. The obstacles mentioned by Minsky and Papert will be overcome in the 1980s with the introduction of what experts call in their jargon backpropagation of error gradient in multilayer neural network systems (the first were monolayers).
Marvin Minsky reviews the history of artificial intelligence in this video and questions also on the future of humanity. For a fairly faithful translation into French, click on the rectangle with two horizontal bars at the bottom right. Subtitles in English should then appear if this is not already the case. Then clicking on the nut to the right of the rectangle, you should see the phrase “Translate subtitles”. Click to display the choice of language menu, select “French” and click “OK”. © Initiative 2045 YouTube
The technological singularity, science-fiction to reality?
Figure Minsky also influenced authors science fiction and not least because it was Isaac Asimov and Arthur Clarke, became his friends, and also Stanley Kubrick, came to see the realization of his legendary film 2001: Odyssey of space. He also had a pupil Daniel Hillis who founded Thinking Machines Corporation. With it, Hillis has made his name by becoming a pioneer of supercomputers working in parallel (not sequentially). In 1992, the fifth version of its Connection Machine, CM-5 was considered the fastest computer in the world. Hillis was a great friend of Richard Feynman and had even recruited the Nobel Prize in physics in his company founded in the early 1980s Feynman, whose interest in computers dates back to World War II and the Manhattan Project, was also Minsky a friend and he happened to come play the bongos in his house.
Towards the end of his life, Minsky, who had also made significant research in the field of robotics and founded in 1985 the MIT Media Lab, supported ideas that are very close to the themes of the technological singularity. For him, Homo sapiens would be replaced in the near future by artificial intelligence robot. We probably will in a few decades if he was right
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