The Discover Interview: Marvin Minsky

Is there other work in neuroscience or AI that interests you?

Very little. There are 20,000 or 30,000 people working on neuronetworks, and there are 40,000 or 50,000 people working on statistical predictors. There are several thousand people trying to get logical systems to do commonsense thinking, but as far as I know, almost none of them can do much reasoning by analogy. This is important because the way people solve problems is first by having an enormous amount of commonsense knowledge, like maybe 50 million little anecdotes or entries, and then having some unknown system for finding among those 50 million old stories the 5 or 10 that seem most relevant to the situation. This is reasoning by analogy. I know of only three or four people looking at this, but they're not well-known because they don't make grandiose claims of looking for a theory of everything.