Marvin Minsky believed that computers could some day be programmed to replicate the functioning of the human brain.
“As Marvin used to say, ‘it doesn’t really matter whether the computer is wet inside or dry inside,'” said Patrick Henry Winston. Winston is an MIT computer science professor and was a friend and colleague of Minsky’s for about 50 years. “'What matters is the kind of computation that’s going on.'”
Minsky
spoke about his work with MIT Technology Review last year.
“I don’t think I ever thought there was anything we couldn’t mechanize eventual," he said. "The question was when and how difficult.”
Minsky founded MIT’s artificial intelligence lab in 1958, and he’s credited with creating the vision for how the field developed. He explored the topic in books, including the “The Society of Mind” which was published in 1985. Winston said Minsky wasn’t so much of a gold mine of new ideas as a diamond mine.
“Because all these diamonds need to be polished a bit before we can see how brightly they can shine, but we’ll be working on the ideas he laid out in rough form in his books for a very long time to come.”
And he said Minsky was a patient teacher to generations of students, who learned something even more important than just those ideas. They learned how to think like him.
