

The Society of Mind Video Lectures - mutor
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-868j-the-society-of-mind-fall-2011/video-lectures/

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gumby
That's funny to see this -- I just saw Marvin yesterday. He's getting frail
but still has that devilish sense of humor and deadpan delivery.

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EdwardCoffin
Can anyone familiar with this book say how well it has aged? It's been on my
shelves, unread (mostly), for years, and I keep wondering whether I should
still aspire to read it.

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rspeer
I'd say that the book started as a bunch of untried ideas for how to represent
interesting processes that show up in cognition... and it's largely the same
now.

It doesn't work very well if you take it as an instruction manual for how to
make AI, especially because it describes many processes that we know no good
way to compute.

But Minsky's writing represents the currently-hibernating field we call "good
old-fashioned AI" (GOFAI). What makes it "good"? GOFAI contains ideas about
what we wish AI could do that we've kind of abandoned in the present, not
because we don't want to do them anymore, but because they're very hard, and
there are easier ways to get results.

The current wave of machine learning techniques will probably give diminishing
returns one day. Going back to a GOFAI text such as Society of Mind is a way
to dream about what comes after that. In the extremely optimistic view, it
might help you recognize an opportunity to do something new with AI when a new
computational technique makes it possible.

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EdwardCoffin
Thanks, GOFAI is indeed the type of AI that I am interested in, so I will try
to finally read it.

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maaku
"The Emotion Machine" is an updated view of Society of Mind. If you already
have SoM I'd recommend reading it first though.

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vmmenon
Its up on iTunesU as well ...

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psbp
And youtube, which is finally an iTunesU replacement now that it has
background listening.

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3rd3
Odd, my App Store still displays the old version with 2/5 stars mostly due to
the lack of multitasking support.

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psbp
They probably haven't updated the iOS app yet.

