Marvin Minsky - Setting up the AI lab with John McCarthy (49/151)

The scientist, Marvin Minsky (1927-2016) was one of the pioneers of the field of Artificial Intelligence, having founded the MIT AI Lab in 1970. Since the 1950s, his work involved trying to uncover human thinking processes and replicate them in machines. [Listener: Christopher Sykes; date recorded: 2011] TRANSCRIPT: One feature of… that goes through this, my later career, was that I never felt I was working very hard except on mathematics or something, and, for example, being director of this laboratory seemed almost effortless because I always had a co-director. So, actually John McCarthy and I started this laboratory mostly because... I was hanging around in... in the very small laboratory of Warren McCulloch who was a... a great pioneer in cybernetics and things like that. And McCarthy, who was a classmate more or less of mine at graduate school, had been at Dartmouth and I forget why, but for some reason he left Dartmouth and came to MIT and we started the Artificial Intelligence laboratory together. In fact, the way it happened is we were talking about needing more students to work on different things and we ran into Jerry Wiesner who was... I think he had just become president of MIT but I’m not sure... right now and mentioned that we needed some support and he said, oh, talk to so-and-so. And that person gave us access to the computer and someone else gave us a room and all of these things happened. But the main thing is that sometimes I would do something or ask...