PERSON
Marvin Minsky
American cognitive scientist (1927–2016), co-founder of the MIT AI Laboratory, father of artificial intelligence, and Carl Sagan's intellectual companion in the work that linked AI research to the cosmic question of other minds.
Marvin Minsky was an American cognitive scientist who co-founded the MIT AI Laboratory with John McCarthy in 1959 and became one of the foundational figures of artificial intelligence as a field of study. His work ranged from the perceptron (1969, co-authored with Seymour Papert), through the frame representation system for knowledge (1974), to The Society of Mind (1985), which proposed that intelligence emerges from the interaction of many simple agents rather than from a single unified process. Isaac Asimov reportedly identified only two people whose intellect he considered to surpass his own: Sagan and Minsky. The Sagan volume treats Minsky's relationship with Sagan as one of the most consequential intellectual friendships of the twentieth century, linking the project of understanding AI to the older project of understanding alien intelligence.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Minsky and Sagan collaborated on the 1973 volume Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which emerged from the landmark 1971 Byurakan conference in Armenia that