In addition to yesterday’s trove of posts about the late Marvin Minsky, I want to refer you to a Backchannel remembrance of the AI pioneer by Steven Levy, the writer who had the good fortune to arrive on the scene at just the right moment in the personal-computer boom and the great talent to capture it. The journalist recalls Minsky’s wit and conversation almost as much as his contributions to tech. Just a long talk with the cognitive scientist was a perception-altering experience, even if his brilliance was intimidating.

[Editor’s note: It should be stated that Levy’s article appeared five years before Minsky was accused of participating in the rape of minor children as part of Jeffrey Epstein’s web of shocking criminality.]

The opening:

There was a great contradiction about Marvin Minsky. As one of the creators of artificial intelligence (with John McCarthy), he believed as early as the 1950s that computers would have human-like cognition. But Marvin himself was an example of an intelligence so bountiful, unpredictable and sublime that not even a million Singularities could conceivably produce a machine with a mind to match his. At the least, it is beyond my imagination to conceive of that happening.

But maybe Marvin could imagine it. His imagination respected no borders.

Minsky died Sunday night, at 88. His body had been slowing down, but that mind had kept churning. He was more than a pioneering computer scientist — he was a guiding light for what intellect itself could do. He was also our Yoda. The entire computer community, which includes all of us, of course, is going to miss him. 

I first met him in 1982; I had written a story for Rolling Stone about young computer hackers, and it was optioned by Jane Fonda’s production company. I traveled to Boston with Fonda’s producer, Bruce Gilbert; and Susan Lyne, who had engineered my assignment to begin with. It was my first trip to MIT; my story about been about Stanford hackers.

I was dazzled by Minsky, an impish man of clear importance whose every other utterance was a rabbit’s hole of profundity and puzzlement.•