I love Marvin Minsky

I've turned on the impatience emotion regarding Marvin Minsky's upcoming book, The Emotion Machine.  I pre-ordered the book a while ago and occassionally check up on it to see when it's going to ship.  The premise of the book is that emotions are the same as thinking.  Or rather, they are strategies for thinking.  We turn on emotions in order to enable certain kinds of problem solving, idea-generating, and decision-making that are evolutionarily suited for the situation.

I held myself over by reading a really old interview with Marvin.  I like this interview a lot because it's clear that the interviewer is overwhelmed with emotion regarding Minsky's ideas, and can barely hold back his irritation.

Look at this:

I think we all want smart machines, but I have trouble with the idea that we'll have emotional machines. They drive me crazy enough.

I don't know what you mean. You're using emotional in some wrong sense.

You don't want a sport utility vehicle going down the highway at 65 miles per hour that gets cut off, has the ability to recognize all the other traffic, recognizes that it was cut off and uses the same kind of rationale as a human being, gets angry and causes an accident.

No. I'm not saying that. You want a machine that has many ways of thinking. They don't have to be the same as people have. So you don't want to revert back to the old meaning of emotion, which is irrational behavior. What you want is to have lots of different ways that are good at solving the problem that you want to solve.

The rational thing for the 6-year-old to do is to kill the baby sister to have all the toys permanently and not get into these quarrels. So what you don't want is a rational machine that works things out logically. You want them to have many ways of looking at them and balance them.

Awesome.  I love his very rational way of sticking up for emotions.  I can't wait for the book to come out.

Read the interview: Moody Computers [eWeek.com]