Marvin Minsky was a pioneer of artificial intelligence.

Minsky foresaw much of how AI would ultimately evolve.

Minsky held that thought and emotions were indelibly connected, a radical notion in psychology at the time.

Marvin Minsky of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computation Center was one of the founders of the emerging field of artificial intelligence. (Vannevar Bush’s work in computing machines and Norbert Weiner’s in cybernetics had established MIT as a hub of research in the area.) While the term “artificial intelligence” was coined by John McCarthy while at Dartmouth in 1955, Minsky singularly foresaw the future of the technology. “We are on the threshold of an era that will be strongly influenced, and quite possibly dominated by intelligent problem-solving machines,” he stated in 1961, quite accurately describing where we are with AI some 65 years later.

When not thinking literally brainy thoughts (his Princeton Ph.D. dissertation was titled “Theory of Neural-analog Reinforcement Systems and its Application to the Brain-model Problem”), Minsky was able to make the foreign subject of artificial intelligence relatively understandable to a lay audience. “Scientists working on the problem of artificial intelligence are slowly learning how to exploit the structure of the modern computer,” he said, with “magnificent intellectual resources” to be released if the machines could be programmed properly.

Importantly, Minsky drew a distinction between........

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