Minsky/LLMs

09 May 2025 - 14 Feb 2026

I wonder what he'd think. I suspect he'd say it was a great big distraction, disastrous in some ways to the real project of understanding how minds work. He would not be inclined to view what it is doing as real intelligence.

OTOH – they can do a lot of interesting and powerful things! And while they may not be intelligent in their own right, they seem perfectly suited to be components of a Society of Mind or tools for realizing Marvin Minsky/Why programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood and sloppily-formulated ideas.

People seem to realize this, that's why everybody and his brother is building some kind of "agent platform" with no very good idea what that means.