I found the logic of this essay to be less than stellar. He rejects early animal-based experiments on learning, but says that Cybernetics is a more promising arena. But he doesn't address his original complaint, that human minds are different than those experimental subjects.
He also made some logical leaps without citations for his sources, nor explanations of the logic used to reach his conclusions.
I get his main point - that people need to become self-aware and teach themselves techniques for their own self improvement. But how can a 6 year old do that? They are simply not yet developed. The human brain is not done developing until one's mid-twenties. That needs to be accounted for when proposing educational changes.
The fact that he presented that had the most substance was that "genius" was strongly correlated with early childhood environments that encouraged very active use of the child's own imagination.
From all of this,I'd be much more apt to draw the conclusion that to improve education, we should just all throw out our TVs.
At least many 12-year-olds can learn to self-modify if they are taught properly. Some of the research in this area are summarized in "Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence" http://www.amazon.com/Outsmarting-IQ-Emerging-Learnable-Inte...
One of the fathers of AI discusses education in a series of essays for the One Laptop per Child project. This last essay about psychology and learning to think is especially interesting, in my opinion.
The last section on "How it can help to think of oneself as a Machine" could really make a difference if we find ways to deploy the ideas to the mass. For now, applying the ideas to oneself can potentially change our own productivity significantly.
Well, that depends on your definition of AI, of course. But using some definitions, we are having it in several forms like search engines, self-driving cars, and question-answering machines.
Personally I think that it is unnecessarily agrandising language. That AI has since improved independently of Minsky does not really have anything to do with it.
Also it can be a fine line between having civil discussion and becoming an echo chamber where vigorous disagreement does not occur. Not that my original reply was the finest example of disagreement to grace this site.
He also made some logical leaps without citations for his sources, nor explanations of the logic used to reach his conclusions.
I get his main point - that people need to become self-aware and teach themselves techniques for their own self improvement. But how can a 6 year old do that? They are simply not yet developed. The human brain is not done developing until one's mid-twenties. That needs to be accounted for when proposing educational changes.
The fact that he presented that had the most substance was that "genius" was strongly correlated with early childhood environments that encouraged very active use of the child's own imagination.
From all of this,I'd be much more apt to draw the conclusion that to improve education, we should just all throw out our TVs.