Minskys Lecture

Marvin Minsky is a professor who lectures and teaches about Media Arts and Sciences. He is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Description. In the lecture i listened too, Marvin talked about common sense thinking, artificial intelligence, and the future of the human mind. There is a long history of artificial intelligence. Minsky discussed the history, the future of the growth of artificial intelligence as well as the current situation, and where it will find its place in the coming decades. Human beings have a logical way of thinking, and Minsky discussed why it is hard to create machines aka computers, databases, etc, using artificial intelligence to match the human mind.

Minsky asked the question, Does an expert system contain common sense? In his opinion, machines may have a little common sense. Machines store a certain knowledge base which in return allows the common sense. There is certain things that are able to assist the machines to have some answers, but not all. Just because they have a knowledge base, does not make them experts. Machines can be created for specific purposes or tasks but it is the creation that allows this, not just expert knowledge. This is different than huamns because we do have common sense even if we have no expertise. Minsky used a specific example to illustrate this idea. He used a 4 year old child being able to identify things in a room. This is common sense for the kid, and it does not require the kid to operate off of different codes like machines do. If you asked a machine to identify objects in a room, it might be impossible because they need to operate off of codes. They need specific instructions, but a child can learn from the environment and do so quite easily and fast. It takes a lot of time and intelligence to program these machines to be able to perform actions, because they can not think on their own with common sense. In the future we may be able to make a machine which inherits lots of common sense to be able to do something such as sweing up a torn shirt. At the moment, there is nothing like this in the world.