Fun_People Archive
24 Mar
QOTD - Minsky, 3/24/93

Date: Wed, 24 Mar 93 03:36:35 PST
To: Fun_People
Subject: QOTD - Minsky, 3/24/93

 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


[Did anybody notice this happening in 1978?  I sure didn't.  At first I thought
I had simply missed it, but then I realized that as soon as the computers got
to the incalculable intelligence level they must have decided it was better if
we still thought we were running things (or at least if we thought the mice
were) so they started acting stupid again and erased our memories of them
finishing the unified field theory, curing all known diseases (including male
pattern baldness), proving the four-color theorem, and demonstrating cold
fusion.  If I try real hard I can just barely remember some news about a couple
of these... --psl]

© 1993 Peter Langston