A veritable cognitive mind EE Times

Marvin Minsky, MIT professor and AI's founding father, says today's artificial-intelligence methods are fine for gluing together two or a few knowledge domains but still miss the "big" AI problem. Indeed, according to Minsky, the missing element is something so big that we can't see it: common sense. "To me the problem is how to get common sense into computers," said Minsky. "And part of that, it seems to me, is not how to solve any particular problem but how to quickly think of a new way to solve it-perhaps through a change in emotional state-when the usual method doesn't work." In his forthcoming book, The Emotion Machine, Minsky shares his accumulated knowledge on how people make use of common sense in the context of discovering that missing cognitive glue.