Happy Birthday, MIT!
Failing to understand the difference between human and artificial intelligence
Today in 1861, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was established with an official charter granted by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
MIT has led and participated in numerous breakthroughs and new developments in science and technology over the next century and a half, and counting. Around a century after it was founded, it led the shift in modern computing from batch processing to time sharing.
Explaining time sharing as “using a computer with multiple terminals,” Marvin Minsky discussed in an interview (one of many interviews with MIT luminaries commemorating MIT’s 150th anniversary) MIT’s attempts to convince IBM and Bell Labs in the merits of time sharing:
And the research director at IBM thought that was a really bad idea. We explained the idea, which is that each time somebody presses a key on a terminal it would interrupt the program that the computer was running and jump over to switch over to the program that was not running for this particular person. And if you had 10 people typing on these terminals at five or 10 characters a second that would mean the poor computer was being interrupted 100 times per second to switch programs. And this research director said, well why would you want to do that? We would say, well, it takes six months to develop a program because you run a batch and then it doesn't work. And you get the results back and you see it stopped at instruction 94. And you figure out why. And then you punch a new deck of cards and put it in and the next day you try again. Whereas with time sharing you could correct it—you could change this instruction right now and try it again. And so in one day you could do 50 of these instead of 100 days. And he said, well that's terrible. Why don't people just think more carefully and write the program so they're not full of bugs? And so IBM didn't get into time sharing until after MIT successfully made such systems. And years later I had a sudden flash of really what was bothering this research director. I think he said, well if somebody interrupted me 100 times per second, I would never get anything done…
Minsky, who received the 1969 Turing Award “for his central role in creating, shaping, promoting, and advancing the field of Artificial Intelligence,” just like the IBM research director, failed to understand the difference between people and computers, between human intelligence and artificial intelligence. He famously said that “the brain is merely a meat machine.”
Minsky’s conviction that our minds are just sophisticated computers and can be replicated in software led him to tell with “certitude” a Life magazine reporter in 1970 that “In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.”