There was a failure to recognize the deep problems in AI; for instance, those captured in Blocks World. The people building physical robots learned nothing.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the shortcomings in understanding the complexities of AI during its development.
Marvin Minsky's quote emphasizes the failure of developers and researchers in the field of artificial intelligence to grasp and address the underlying challenges that come with it, particularly exemplified by the 'Blocks World' problem. Minsky argues that despite the technological advancements and the building of physical robots, there was a lack of awareness and learning from the fundamental issues that AI faces, suggesting that understanding those deep, inherent problems is crucial to the future of AI development.
In practice
In a tech conference, one might reference this quote to discuss the barriers faced in AI development.
If you understand something in only one way, then you don't really understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all other things we know. Well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that's what we mean by thinking!
You don't understand anything unless you understand there are at least 3 ways.
I think every person either inherits or eventually makes up their own idea of what they are and who they are and what caused the world to be, and it seems to me that these stories of creation myth, adopted by different cultures - most of them are less insightful than the stories made up by individual poets and writers.
I believe that everyone has to construct a mental model of what they are and where they came from and why they are as they are, and the word soul in each person is the name for that particular mish-mash of those fully formed ideas of one's nature.
If you just have a single problem to solve, then fine, go ahead and use a neural network. But if you want to do science and understand how to choose architectures, or how to go to a new problem, you have to understand what different architectures can and cannot do.
You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.
Protecting yourself is very challenging in the hostile environment of the Internet. Imagine a global environment where an unscrupulous person from the other side of the planet can probe your computer for weaknesses and exploit them to gain access to your most sensitive secrets.
Like most early enthusiasts, I always thought the way the Internet encouraged multitasking made users less vulnerable to manipulation, while simultaneously exploiting even more of our brain's capacity than before. Apparently not.
If there is technological advance without social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery.
More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services - from movies to agriculture to national defense.
My people, we stay indoors. We have keyboards. We have darkness. It's quiet.
You know, I'm a big believer in touch and digital reading, but I still think that some mixture of voice, the pen and a real keyboard - in other words a netbook - will be the mainstream on that.
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