Marvin Minsky

If you can't think of three different explanations for something, you don't understand it.

The world is not divided into 'interesting' and 'boring' things. It is divided into things we understand and things we don't.

The mind is a kludge.

The self is a society of agents that have learned to work together.

Pain and pleasure are not opposites; they are different kinds of signals that our bodies use to teach our minds.

The purpose of memory is not just to store information, but to prepare us for the future.

Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

To make a machine that can think, we must first understand what it means to think—and that is the hardest problem of all.

The difference between a bug and a feature is a matter of opinion.

We are all, in a sense, experts at being human, but we have no idea how we do it.

The best model of a cat is another cat. Or better yet, the cat itself.

One reason why programming is so difficult is that we are usually trying to make a machine do something that we ourselves do not understand very well.

The history of AI is a history of fantasies, possibilities, demonstrations, and promises.

When we say a machine 'understands,' we really mean that it behaves in a way that is useful to us.

The problem with computers is that they do what you tell them to do, not what you want them to do.

We should stop trying to make machines that are perfect and start trying to make machines that are useful.

The most important thing about a problem is not its solution, but the strength we gain in finding the solution.

In the future, computers may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.