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I spoke w/ Marvin Minsky once back in the 1990s and he told me that he thought "emergent properties" were bunk.

He said the same thing about perceptrons in general. When it comes to bunk, Minsky was... let's just say he was a subject matter expert.

He caused a lot of people to waste a lot of time. I've got your XOR right here, Marvin...

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Minsky is an example of the power of credentialism. He was an MIT professor who researched AI. I think history has pretty much demonstrated he didn't have any special insight into the question of AI, but for decades he was the most famous researcher in the field.

Hard to say. Perceptrons was an early mathematically rigorous book in CS that asked questions about what you could accomplish with a family of algorithms. That said, it is easy to imagine that neural networks could gave gained 5 years or more progress if people had had some good luck early on or taken them more seriously.

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