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The scientist, Marvin Minsky (1927-2016) was one of the pioneers of the field of Artificial Intelligence, having founded the MIT AI Lab in 1970. Since the 1950s, his work involved trying to uncover human thinking processes and replicate them in machines. [Listener: Christopher Sykes; date recorded: 2011]

TRANSCRIPT: We stopped writing together so much and I went on working on the... what became the chapters of The Society of Mind. So, in that period I had fewer students, but still a small number of very good ones who did work on some of these theories. And this happened in the environment of the Media Lab, but in effect I had stopped building robots and inventing gadgets and was spending more time trying to develop the successive levels of this theory. And so, The Society of Mind has this 300 pages of... each describing a few... couple of ideas and connections with others and... that was a... that happened in the early years of being at the Media Lab. A lot of these ideas – of course – developed by... by teaching things in a course. So every year I would give a course which involved lectures on the current state of ideas about these different topics. And the great thing was that there were no exams in this course, but the students had to write papers; short papers and then a longer paper toward the end of the term. And then, I usually got a few of the older... ex-students or graduate students to... to read those papers and summarise them and sort of grade them, but the main thing was that this was a... almost a decade of getting people to do thought experiments or... on... on developing these ideas. So, in the early years of the artificial intelligence lab, I was directly involved in most of the actual experiments and projects for programming computers to do things. And then this period, I’m working on these hundreds of small theories and trying to fit them together and getting students to write little essays about that. And that was most of the years that I was at the Media Lab.

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