Marvin Minsky

Marvin Lee Minsky was born on August 9, 1927, into a Jewish family in New York City. His mother was Fannie (Reiser), a Zionist activist, and his father was Henry, an eye surgeon. Minsky attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School and the Bronx High School of Science. He later attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1944 to 1945 before returning to his education and earning a A.B. in mathematics from Harvard University (1950) and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University (1954). His doctoral dissertation was titled "Theory of neural-analog reinforcement systems and its application to the brain-model problem".

Minsky began his academic career as a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1954 to 1957. He joined the MIT faculty in 1958 and remained there until his death. He joined the staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1958; a year later, he and John McCarthy initiated what was, as of 2003, named the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

At the time of his death, Minsky was the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences as well as professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.

In 1952, Minsky married pediatrician Gloria Rudisch; together they had three children. Minsky was a talented improvisational pianist, and published musings on the relations between music and the mind.

Opinions

Minsky was an atheist. He was a signatory to the Scientists' Open Letter on Cryonics.

He was a critic of the Loebner Prize for conversational robots, and argued that a fundamental difference between humans and machines is that while humans are machines, they are machines in which intelligence emerges from the interplay of the many unintelligent but semi-autonomous agents the brain comprises. He argued that "somewhere down the line, some computers will become more intelligent than most people", but that it was very hard to predict how fast progress would be. He cautioned that an artificial superintelligence designed to solve an innocuous mathematical problem might decide to assume control of Earth's resources to build supercomputers to help achieve its goal, but believed that such scenarios are "hard to take seriously" because he felt confident that AI would be well tested before being deployed.