Time Travel
Invoking the 1956 AI conference in Dartmouth brings to mind Marvin Minsky, an unforgettable human mind. Upon his death in 2016, I wondered whether even the most advanced AI could ever match the meat inside his head. It’s a scary thought.
There was a great contradiction about Marvin Minsky. As one of the creators of artificial intelligence (with John McCarthy), he believed as early as the 1950s that computers would have human-like cognition. But Marvin himself was an example of an intelligence so bountiful, unpredictable and sublime that not even a million Singularities could conceivably produce a machine with a mind to match his. At the least, it is beyond my imagination to conceive of that happening. But maybe Marvin could imagine it. His imagination respected no borders …
I was dazzled by Minsky, an impish man of clear importance whose every other utterance was a rabbit’s hole of profundity and puzzlement. He’d been a professor at MIT since 1958, had invented stuff like the head mounted display, and besides AI, had done pioneering work in neural nets and robotics. But even had he done nothing, the blinding brilliance of his conversation, leavened by the humor of a lighthearted borscht belt comic, would have cemented a legacy. He questioned everything, and his observations were quirky, innovative, and made such perfect sense that you wonder why no one else had thought of them. After a couple of hours with him, your own vision of the world was altered. Only years later did I realize that his everyday Minsky-ness imparted a basic lesson: if you saw the world the way everybody else did, how smart could you really be?
Ask Me One Thing
Mark asks, “What does tech have to worry about in another Trump term?”
Thanks for asking, Mark. I’ll avoid making general remarks about what everyone has to worry about in another Trump term and concentrate on the question at hand. The climate for tech after a Trump victory is more complicated now that a number of super-rich Silicon Valley tech figures are supporting the former president—felony conviction notwithstanding. This week, tech billionaires Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks hosted a sold-out Trump fundraiser, which charged $300,000 to join the “host committee” and stay for dinner, and $50,000 to attend just the reception. Elon Musk is reportedly angling to be Trump’s tech adviser in a second term.
