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Views | Duration | ||
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51. Hiring technicians to run the AI lab properly | 879 | 02:14 | |
52. Reading HG Wells as a child | 1525 | 01:54 | |
53. Why I prefer science fiction to general literature | 1984 | 03:04 | |
54. Arthur C Clarke was given his own satellite | 1482 | 01:23 | |
55. Olaf Stapledon's science fiction | 1548 | 00:29 | |
56. Visiting NASA with Carl Sagan | 1613 | 03:05 | |
57. My real life designs for Arthur C Clarke's space elevator | 1603 | 03:03 | |
58. Why I decided to work on the space elevator | 1614 | 00:57 | |
59. The contribution of email to space ideas | 1764 | 01:27 | |
60. Handwriting recognition machines at the MIT labs | 2224 | 02:46 |
You know, I think that one could attribute this particular... the space thing to email because all of the calculations and discussions of this thing went back and forth, because if I passed a terminal and I had some idea I could send an email to Lowell Wood… I forget the other couple of guys who were involved. So you know, if you just got an idea you could type it over to those people and… so it might be that the medium was more of the message than the... than anything else. I’ve never been to Livermore, but it’s just around the corner when you have this keyboard.
Maybe that’s the answer; you have a friend and you know they’re interested in something and in the old days you would have to write a letter and put a stamp on it or something and it’s just too much trouble so you’d do something else. But... but now if you want to communicate with someone you just take out your iPhone and do it. So I’ve had some friends that I’ve never met.
Marvin Minsky (1927-2016) was one of the pioneers of the field of Artificial Intelligence, founding the MIT AI lab in 1970. He also made many contributions to the fields of mathematics, cognitive psychology, robotics, optics and computational linguistics. Since the 1950s, he had been attempting to define and explain human cognition, the ideas of which can be found in his two books, The Emotion Machine and The Society of Mind. His many inventions include the first confocal scanning microscope, the first neural network simulator (SNARC) and the first LOGO 'turtle'.
Title: The contribution of email to space ideas
Listeners: Christopher Sykes
Christopher Sykes is a London-based television producer and director who has made a number of documentary films for BBC TV, Channel 4 and PBS.
Tags: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lowell Wood
Duration: 1 minute, 28 seconds
Date story recorded: 29-31 Jan 2011
Date story went live: 12 May 2011