Marvin Minsky

It's degrading or insulting to say somebody is a good person or has a soul. Each person has built this incredibly complex structure, and if you attribute it to a magical pearl in the middle of an oyster that makes you good, that's trivializing a person and keeps you from thinking of what's really happening.

I suspect that pleasure is mainly used to turn off parts of the brain so you can keep fresh the memories of things you're trying to learn. It protects the short-term memory buffers. That's one theory of pleasure.

The basic idea in case-based, or CBR, is that the program has stored problems and solutions. Then, when a new problem comes up, the program tries to find a similar problem in its database by finding analogous aspects between the problems.

With the appearance of communications networks and interconnected computers, we got the world wide web, and it changed the lives of most people, I think.

I heard that the same thing occurred in a scene in Alien, where the creature pops out of the chest of a crewman. The other actors didn't know what was to happen; the director wanted to get true surprise.

I believe that everyone has to construct a mental model of what they are and where they came from and why they are as they are, and the word soul in each person is the name for that particular mish-mash of those fully formed ideas of one's nature.

I think Lenat is headed in the right direction, but someone needs to include a knowledge base about learning.

When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation; he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems.

No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing; but most of the time, we aren't either.

I started working at a point in history when digital computers were becoming mature, and before that, there were no such machines.

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.

I believed in realism, as summarized by John McCarthy's comment to the effect that if we worked really hard, we'd have an intelligent system in from four to four hundred years.