The Emotion Machine

Started to read The Emotion Machine, by Marvin Minksy, first published in 2006. I remember the first time I read about Minsky. It was in Steve Levy’s Hackers, the chapter about the old days at MIT, during Richard Greenblatt’s sophomore year when he wrote a FORTRAN compiler for the PDP-1:

Someone like Marvin Minksy might happen along and say “Here is a robot arm. I am leaving this robot arm by the machine.” Immediately, nothing in the world is as essential as making the proper interface between the machine and the robot arm, and putting the robot arm under your control, and figuring a way to create a system where the robot arm knows what the hell it is doing. Then you can see your offspring come to life.

- Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, 1984