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General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.

Marvin Minsky

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Marvin Minsky
Age: 88 †
Born: 1927
Born: August 9
Died: 2016
Died: January 24
Artificial Intelligence Researcher
Computer Scientist
Mathematician
Scientist
University Teacher
New York City
New York
Marvin Lee Minsky
Marvin L. Minsky
Lives
Science
Screw
Else
Screws
Problem
General
Everything
Problems
Much
Fiction
Way
Pretty
People
Ways

More quotes by Marvin Minsky

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Theorems often tell us complex truths about the simple things, but only rarely tell us simple truths about the complex ones. To believe otherwise is wishful thinking or mathematics envy.
Marvin Minsky
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One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry.
Marvin Minsky
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Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.
Marvin Minsky
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Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!
Marvin Minsky
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Everything is similar if you're willing to look far out of focus.
Marvin Minsky
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If we understood something just one way, we would not understand it at all.
Marvin Minsky
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Eventually, robots will make everything.
Marvin Minsky
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But just as astronomy succeeded astrology, following Kepler's discovery of planetary regularities, the discoveries of these many principles in empirical explorations of intellectual processes in machines should lead to a science, eventually.
Marvin Minsky
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Everything, including that which happens in our brains, depends on these and only on these: A set of fixed, deterministic laws.
Marvin Minsky
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The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.
Marvin Minsky
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Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days.
Marvin Minsky
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It would be as useless to perceive how things 'actually look' as it would be to watch the random dots on untuned television screens.
Marvin Minsky
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What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle.
Marvin Minsky
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Kubrick's vision seemed to be that humans are doomed, whereas Clarke's is that humans are moving on to a better stage of evolution.
Marvin Minsky
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How many processes are going on, to keep that teacup level in your grasp? There must be a hundred of them.
Marvin Minsky
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In science, one learns the most by studying what seems to be the least.
Marvin Minsky
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By the way, it was his simulations that helped out in Jurassic Park - without them, there would have been only a few dinosaurs. Based on his techniques, Industrial Light and Magic could make whole herds of dinosaurs race across the screen.
Marvin Minsky
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You don't understand anything unless you understand there are at least 3 ways.
Marvin Minsky
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The brain happens to be a meat machine.
Marvin Minsky
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No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing but most of the time, we aren't either.
Marvin Minsky