Marvin Minsky - The Harvard Society of Fellows 'like a rotary club' (32/151)

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: I went back to Harvard from ‘54 to ‘57 for three years as part of this so-called Society of Fellows, and again that was a little community, but they were… each person was in a different field, pretty much, so it was like a Rotary Club; and there were poets like Donald Hall and John Hollander, two friends, and there was the junior Fellows at the time I was there… what’s his name, the Ant Man?

[CS] EO Wilson.

Yep. Ed Wilson was there some of the time – most of the time he would be in a little telephone booth in some jungle watching some animals – and there was Noam Chomsky, who was making his terrible theories about language at the time.