Marvin Minsky - Why we should publish failures in AI research (123/151)
3,253 views · Published 17 October 2016 · 1:10 · Indexed 26 October 2026
Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2016 · Science & Technology
To hear more of Marvin Minsky’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB2SsvcECzI&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFxJatFYBb7P4NZscvJw1f0r 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: One problem with my field is that people publish experiments where the machine does succeed in learn… apparently learning something – maybe really learning, perhaps – but they don’t publish failures when they say: 'Well, we tried to get this machine to distinguish between cats and dogs and we had 4,000 pictures and it didn’t do much better than chance.' We never see papers published, or hardly ever. And so, there’s something a little bit wrong. In physics, you win a Nobel Prize if you can show that some old theory isn’t quite right. In artificial intelligence, you might lose the company that’s paying for your research if you publish a failure. And so that’s another reason why we need more institutions that are not based on quick payoffs.
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