In the months leading up to the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, a landmark test for autonomous vehicles, Sebastian Thrun, the head of Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Lab, could not know whether his team's robotic vehicle, nicknamed Stanley, would triumph. Yet when interviewed by NOVA producers Jason Spingarn-Koff and Joe Seamans, this robotics enthusiast was brimming with excitement, confident that the race would herald a new era of vehicles that drive themselves. Stanford computer scientist Sebastian Thrun has long been driven to make smart machines. Now a smart machine named Stanley can drive him. Sebastian Thrun: It's a no-brainer for me that at some point our cars will have the ability to drive themselves.

Marvin Minsky has long been one of the great human intelligences working in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). A professor at MIT, where he has worked since 1957 and cofounded the AI laboratory in 1959, Minsky is also an inventor, philosopher, and author. In recent years, Minsky has focused his formidable talents on trying to impart the human capacity for commonsense reasoning to machines. In this interview, conducted on November 3, 2010 by "Smartest Machine on Earth" producer Michael Bicks, hear Minsky's take on why it's important to recreate human intelligence, what a five-year-old can do that even the smartest machine cannot, and whether someone will ever invent a computer that laughs at Seinfeld. Marvin Minsky says that when it comes to designing a smart machine, "you mustn't look for a magic bullet"--that is, just a single way to solve all problems.