Even though skilled practitioners like Grossberg were not fooled for a moment by Minsky and Papert’s erroneous conjecture that the use of layers would not allow XOR to be solved, the real travesty was the misrepresentation to the novices that were not yet in the business of reading peer reviewed scientific journals.

In science absolute realism is necessary but seldom sufficient. It is however a matter of historical fact that researchers had encountered and addressed the shortcomings of the single layer perceptron prior to the initial publication of Perceptrons and had widely published the results within a year of it’s initial publication. It is a distinct discredit to Minsky and Perceptrons that he waited more than a decade (1987) to amend the book and then he only did so in the foreword.

People blindly idolizing this fool is the one of the reasons behind the AI winter of the 1970’s. His criticism of artficial neural networks and genetic algorithms are accepted as gospel by idolotars.  Just like the end of this talk, he sometimes criticises without complete substantiation which historically has had far more of an effect than his positive contributions. Scepticism is the luxury of those without real problems.

He made a reasonable criticism of these systems (perceptrons can’t learn xor). Which forced a reevaluation of the neural networks (to get multi-layer perceptrons). That’s what science is. His approach was perfectly ligit and reasonable.

this guy is scary smart

He might be a horrible speaker, but he’s one of the most intelligent people in the world right now.Isaac Asimov: The only 2 people I’ve ever met that I admit are more intelligen than me are Carl Sagan and Marvin Minsky

No doubt Minsky is a genius, but as everyone who knows him would tell you, “he cannot talk himself out of a bag”

eccentricity; often an overlookable hallmark of highly, (highly) intelligent people

speaker was pretty ballsy to talk about world population and garbage in one topic.

Lol this guy is awesome. Public education is rubbish.