Farewell to Marvin Minsky, the “father” of the app and intelligent robots – The Gazzettino

The robots ‘smart’ learn to speak and study a cure for cancer, but also the software, now ‘app’, which independently write political speeches and newspaper articles or regulating the temperature of the house. The AI ​​has these and a thousand other faces and if today were able to feel emotions cry the death of one of his ancestors: the scientist Marvin Misky, died in Boston for a brain hemorrhage at the age of 88 years. Pioneer of artificial intelligence but also inventor – he was responsible for the confocal scanning microscope – Minsky has worked extensively at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) exploring the potential impact it would have on society the arrival of machines able to think like man.

“The idea of ​​artificial intelligence that we have today, we owe to him,” says Daniela Rus, director of the MIT AI Lab, Minsky – along with John McCarthy – he helped found in 1959 coined the ‘ very expression of “artificial intelligence”. They speak for themselves the titles of the books most famous of Minsky, from The Society of Mind 1985 The emotion machine in 2006. For his research has received numerous awards including the ACM Turing Award. The scientist was convinced that digital information should be shared freely, the notion that today’s software “open source” have embraced. Took part in the original ARPAnet, the “mother” of the Internet.

And in confirmation of a personality as bright as eclectic – it was also a talented pianist – is his collaboration with Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Clarke for 2001 A Space Odyssey. Minsky considered the brain as a machine that can be studied and whose operation could be replicated on a computer. This, in turn, could reveal the mechanisms of the human brain. Among the many merits that it has developed the ancestors of intelligent robots. His studies leave us a legacy far from abstract or theoretical. Today they are already among us Pepper, the humanoid robot that understands the emotions, but also the child robot iCub, the Italian Institute of Technology.

The latest report of the World Economic Forum has estimated the loss of 5 million jobs within four years because of the use of intelligent machines. Forms of artificial intelligence are in some of the apps that we already use – virtual assistants smartphone – while more advanced ones animate the super computer like IBM’s Watson. In Italy he was born the artificial brain of Annabell, who has learned to recognize words and rules of human language ‘dialogue with the man. Even the anti-buffaloes developed by Wikipedia is based on artificial intelligence, as well as the work of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University who are teaching the computer to recognize irony and sarcasm through Twitter. And on artificial link all of today’s giants of the Internet, from Google to Facebook. So much so that this year Mark Zuckerberg aims to create a “butler” for the house with artificial intelligence.