Marvin Minsky - "The Emotion Machine" (90/151)

Описание: To hear more of Marvin Minsky’s stories, go to the playlist:    • Marvin Minsky - The amazing videophone fro...  

The scientist, Marvin Minsky (1927-2016) was one of the pioneers of the field of Artificial Intelligence, having founded the MIT AI Lab in 1970. Since the 1950s, his work involved trying to uncover human thinking processes and replicate them in machines. [Listener: Christopher Sykes; date recorded: 2011]

TRANSCRIPT: I wrote a second book which tried to reorganize this and some new higher level ideas, into a more systematic description, so that new book, which is called The Emotion Machine, for political reasons, it actually makes fun of emotions. But that book has more or less 10 big chapters, each of which tries to tell a particular story about certain ways of thinking and how they might work and what’s good and bad about them and… and how you decide when to use one.

So that’s more like a conventional book and my impression is that, in the end, it’s much harder to read, because… because the world doesn’t really have a plot and when you try to help people by giving them a plot, you might just envelop the whole thing with…with one really large idea that’s probably wrong and... so instead of learning the 10 important different things that got condensed into that chapter, you’re learning one really not very good theory about trying to explain how they all relate. So it’s a tough one and I think in general it might be that psychology is not the kind of thing that can be explained by good stories, much as people wish it could.