Look Who it Was Random video

Marvin Minsky - Seymour Papert's little scientists (87/151)

4,245 views · Published 31 October 2016 · 2:24 · Indexed 6 November 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2016 · Science & Technology

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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: And so then our worlds started to divide a little bit. I wrote the book called Society of Mind and Seymour wrote several books of theories about how children develop and what might help them. And he tried to start a movement in which he would train teachers to develop this kind of constructive point of view where children would actually think about problems and build models of them and experiment and be like little scientists or like little researchers and the hope was that you train a few teachers to do this and they’ll train a few more and we all hoped that in a decade maybe there would be thousands of these groups and these new ideas would spread and spread and spread, but... didn’t really work that way, for reasons I can’t understand. If you train 10 teachers then the next year they might train nine others and the next year there might be seven or eight and instead of spreading like an epidemic, like the flu, these efforts sort of ran along steadily and then died out. I have no idea why they didn’t become more popular or what went wrong.

But, anyway, I kept working on the basic theory of how large numbers of different ways of thinking could be organized and Papert worked on more trying to see how do these actually work in children and what can be done to help them develop better strategies and tactics and so forth and I hope all this will come together again in the next... next few years, but I’m worried that with the economic depression and the limitation of resources that... that my fifty years of research was a golden age that might be tapering off and I’m just hoping it will start up again.

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