I read it fairly recently, and I agree that it is both great and short. Regarding multi-layer neural nets Minsky says they're uninteresting as they could be de

I read it fairly recently, and I agree that it is both great and short. Regarding multi-layer neural nets Minsky says they're uninteresting as they could be declared with enough complexity to basically reimplement any existing logic circuit. What made multi-layer neural nets interesting again was a multi-layer training algorithm. There another interesting part, shortly after showing that single-layer neural nets can't implement the XOR function, Minsky shows that all that's required for a single-layer neural net to implement the XOR function is to add another column to the training set with specific values, effectively encoding the hidden layer back into the training set.