Marvin Minsky life and biography

Marvin Lee Minsky is an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy.

Marvin Minsky is perhaps the foremost living expert on the theory of artificial intelligence. He designed the first neural network simulator in 1951, and the first confocal scanning microscope in 1956. With John McCarthy and others he founded what became the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1959.

He designed and built early visual scanners, made key contributions to the development of robotics and computer-aided learning technologies, and he has studied cognitive psychology, mathematics, computational linguistics, and optics.

He contributed to the development of Logic Oriented Graphic Oriented (LOGO) language, and with Seymour Papert built the first Logo "turtle" device in 1969.

He has proposed a mechanistic theory to explain the workings of the mind, and explain how it might be modeled to create an artificial intelligence. He has described "consciousness" or "self-awareness" as a myth — a convenient but incorrect concept — and said that the key to artificial intelligence will be when computers are designed with common sense.

He co-authored the 1992 science fiction novel The Turing Option with Harry Harrison, which envisions the construction of a super-intelligent machine.

In November 2006, Minsky published The Emotion Machine, a book that critiques many popular theories of how human minds work and suggests alternative theories, often replacing simple ideas with more complex ones. Recent drafts of the book are freely available from his webpage.

Marvin Minsky is affiliated with the following organizations:
-United States National Academy of Engineering
-United States National Academy of Sciences
-Extropy Institute's Council of Advisors
-Alcor Life Extension Foundation's Scientific Advisory Board
-kynamatrix Research Network's Board of Directors
Minsky is a critic of the Loebner Prize.

Author of books:
-Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines (1967, textbook)
-Semantic Information Processing (1968, edited by Minsky)
-Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry (1969, non-fiction, with Seymour Papert)
-Artificial Intelligence (1972, non-fiction, with Seymour Papert)
-The Society of Mind (1986, non-fiction)
-The Turing Option (1992, novel, with Harry Harrison)
-The Emotion Machine (2006, non-fiction)

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