Of all the celebrities and bigwigs I looked forward to meeting at
TransVision 2007
there was only one person who I was truly nervous about running into –
a person who gave me that 'I’m going to squeal like a little girl when
I see him’ kind of feeling.
That individual was pioneering neuroscientist
Marvin Minsky.
A
friend cautioned me by claiming that he was a difficult man and not
very approachable. I dismissed the warning and patiently waited for an
opportunity to start a conversation with him.
I eventually got
my chance. I was with two other friends when the three of us bumped
into Minsky in the reception area of the conference hall. Without
hesitation I approached and introduced myself. After we shook hands I
told him how much I appreciated his work and how much of an honour it
was for me to finally meet him. He nodded his head and didn’t say a
word.
I was surprised by how old he looked. Minsky is now 80
years old and has been working in the field of neuroscience since the
1950s. Despite his age he recently published a book,
The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind. Minsky just keeps on going.
Working
to move the conversation along, I told him that while I was conducting
research for my presentation I discovered that he was a presenter at
the seminal
SETI conference in 1971 in Byurakan.
Minsky made waves at that conference by having the audacity to suggest
that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations would likely be comprised
of machine minds. It was a controversial suggestion, one that has only
come into acceptance in more recent times. I asked Minsky for a
first-hand account of how his idea was received back in 1971.
He
stood there, just blankly looking at me, and didn’t say a single word.
We all waited in silence for what seemed an eternity. I got the
distinct impression that he was thoroughly disinterested in our little
group.
Being a sucker for punishment I decided to move the
conversation along. I unabashedly gave him the 10 second executive
summary of my TV07 presentation, where I make some claims about the
limitations of extraterrestrial civilizations and how this might
account for the Great Silence and the problem that is the Fermi Paradox.
This
finally got Minsky going. He had attended a SETI conference two weeks
prior and was impressed with what he heard there. Minsky suggested that
the reason we don’t see any signs of obvious megascale engineering or
cosmological re-tuning by advanced ETI’s is that they have no sense of
urgency to embark upon such projects. He argued that advanced
intelligences won’t engage in these sorts of Universe changing
exercises until the very late stages of the cosmos.
Jeez, I thought to myself, I hadn't considered that.Leave
it to Marvin Minsky to give me some serious food for thought a mere two
hours before I was to give my talk. I was suddenly worried that this
consideration would pierce a glaring hole in my argument.
After
another minute of idle chit-chat I excused myself from Minsky's company
and found a little corner where I could have my little micro-panic and
contemplate his little theory.
The more I thought about it,
however, the more unsatisfied I became with his answer; virtually
everyone has a rather smug solution to the Fermi Paradox, and Marvin
Minsky is no exception. Specifically, I was concerned with how such a
theory could be exclusive to all civilizations. It seemed implausible
to believe that not even one renegade civilization would take it upon
itself to change the rules of the cosmos if it had the capacity to do
so.
Moreover, given the power to reshape the Universe, a strong
case could be made that a meta-ethical imperative exists to turn the
madness that is existence into something profoundly more meaningful and
safer. As Slavoj Žižek once said, existence is a catastrophe of the
highest order. Timothy Leary described the Universe as an "ocean of
chaos."
Waiting until the last minute to create a cosmological
paradise (assuming such a thing is even possible) would seem to be both
exceptionally risky and irresponsible -- not just to the members of a
civilization capable of such feats, but to the larger universal
community itself.
Phew. That's right, that's the answer. Ha, take that, Minsky!So,
after rationalizing a counter-argument to Minsky's suggestion, I was
able to calm down and prepare myself for my presentation and deal with
any follow-up questions that could be thrown my way.
And that's how I met Marvin Minsky.
Sure,
he's not the most personable man I've ever met, but I got the sense
that he's at a time in his life where a) he knows he owes nothing to no
one and b) he'd rather engage with people who can contribute to his
life's work and his ongoing struggle to solve the problem that is human
cognition. And he's still as sharp as they come.
It was truly an honour.