Marvin Minsky

We are still far from understanding how the brain creates consciousness.

A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying to play a violin, and he's going to sound awful. But if you give him a violin and a teacher, and he practices, he can learn to play it. The same is true of computers.

We're not trying to build a brain. We're trying to understand how a brain works.

Common sense is a collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

The only way to understand a complex system is to build it.

If you don't like what you're doing, you can always change it.

The greatest discoveries are made by people who don't know enough to know that something is impossible.

The brain is a computer made of meat.

What we call 'understanding' is really just having a lot of different ways to represent something.

The future of AI is not about building a single super-intelligent machine, but about building a society of intelligent machines.

You can't make a machine that thinks until you know what thinking is.

We're not trying to make machines that are like us. We're trying to make machines that are better than us.

If you want to understand how a bird flies, you don't study feathers. You study aerodynamics.

The problem with common sense is that it's not very common.

The biggest problem in AI is that we don't know what intelligence is.

The brain is not a single thing, but a society of minds.

We're not trying to make machines that are conscious. We're trying to make machines that are intelligent.

The difference between a genius and an ordinary person is that a genius makes more mistakes.

The brain is a machine that makes mistakes, and that's how it learns.

If you're not making mistakes, you're not trying hard enough.