Another challenge is trying to make smart machines that feel. In his book, The Emotion Machine, Minsky says emotions, intuitions, and feelings are not distinct things, but different ways of thinking. He examines them to show how our minds grow from simple thoughts to more complex ideas and predicts that machines will one day be as conscious as humans are, once they begin to build useful models of what has been recently happening inside their own mental processes.
“Today, most psychologists try to imitate physicists and keep trying to find a few simple ‘general laws’ for explaining how human minds work. However, I think that this is a bad mistake, because we know that each brain has evolved several hundred different parts, each of which works in somewhat different ways,” said Minsky. Thus, the book suggests how a thinking and feeling machine could be built using many different methods. Holding up progress, laments Minsky, is the disappearance of funding.
“Basic research in the United States is in terrible shape because budgets have been going down, and most of our formerly great basic research labs have disappeared— forcing many of our most promising young potential scientists to move into product development and financial activities,” he said. “Our leaders failed to recognize that much of our prosperity grew out of basic research that was typically done 20 years before those products appeared. So today, the U.S. economy is floundering—and our conceptual growth is moving to other continents.”
No time for leisure “I don’t have much time for hobbies or pastimes,” said Minsky, “because I keep thinking most of the time. I’m always impelled to uncover new reasons for things and how to make them better—or simpler.” Minsky credits science fiction with inspiring him. “I’ve partly lived in the world of writers like Asimov, Benford, Heinlein, Niven, Sturgeon, and Vinge—all of whom became friends of mine. Lately, I’ve been inspired by ideas from Greg Egan and Robert J. Sawyer.”
When stuck at developing technical theories, he likes to write music, particularly classical fugues. “Fugues use counterpoint, in which several different things happen at the same time, so you have to make yourself think several different thoughts at once. If I had enough time, my goal would be to write a quartet as good as Beethoven’s Opus 131.”
Looking back, Minsky cites three achievements as his most significant. “In 1955, I invented and built the first confocal scanning microscope. I did not stop to commercialize it, but eventually it revolutionized microscopy in laboratories around the world,” he said.
“In seeking to understand the nature of computing, I discovered several new, remarkably simple but ‘universal’ machines—that is, ones that can do all kinds of computations— including one that can do nothing more than increase or decrease either of just two numbers,” he said.
“In the field of psychology, my two books The Society of Mind (1985) and The Emotion Machine (2000) describe many new theories and ideas about how the processes in our brains might be organized into multiple levels of structures that I called K-lines, Frames, Panalogies, and the Critic-Selector model of Thinking. I’m sure that these could also be used in machines to achieve some aspects of human intelligence.”
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