Fun_People Archive
12 Jun
An old "quote"

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Wed, 12 Jun 96 18:05:28 -0700
To: Fun_People
Subject: An old "quote"

From: Marvin Minsky <minsky@media.mit.edu>

A netsearcher produced this article.  Yes, this did appear in a story in
Life magazine. McCarthy, Fredkin, and I considered suing the author, but
decided that there'd be no point to it.  I don't remember the author's name
but he got almost everything else wrong, too.  I recall vaguely that we
might have explained to him the plot of the novel Colussus by D.F.Jones, in
which the machine does become smart -- but the transition to its having
incalculable powers takes only a few minutes, so that it's too late to turn
it off when they realize what is happening.

I have no idea where he got the 3 to 8 years. A plausible interpretation is
that we said something like "in 2000 or 2050", and the writer or editor
changed 'decades' into 'years.


  From: bostic@vangogh.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)

  .... in three to eight years we will have a machine with the general
  intelligence of an average human being ... The machine will begin
  to educate itself with fantastic speed.  In a few months it will be
  at genius level and a few months after that its powers will be
  incalculable ...
                -- Marvin Minsky, LIFE Magazine, November 20, 1970

© 1996 Peter Langston