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The Society of Mind (1986) [pdf]

159 points by eigenvalue 4y ago

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dev_0 4y ago
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bhouston 4y ago
I think it is an interesting idea and it is sort of akin to Freud's ego, superego, subconscious, etc. It is a conceptualization, an abstraction, probably a little arbitrary, that does not map well to physical constructs. To view it from the perspective of deep learning neural networks, one would view the society of mind as a proposed super structure on top of the various deep learning neutral networks. There is this already, like the reinforcement learning structure for Chat GPT, or the multi-focus attentional systems used for code generation. As we built out a full AGI that can interact with the whole, it is likely we will have specialized systems which mimic a society of mind, but given that Minsky's ideas are pretty rough and sort of vague, I am not sure his writings provide the best guidance, but probably can inspire a bit of work.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  Think of humans as artificial neurons. Language is how we back propagate etc
lolc 4y ago
I've been wondering about this too. The book gave me a way to think about consciousness, but I do wonder whether we'll ever see machines that use concepts at the described level. Because humans don't seem to be built that way, and the models we've built so far don't either.
timkam 4y ago
There is still plenty of research going on on agents, symbolic AI, and other approaches that sometimes and somewhat reflect (or have informed) ideas from Society of Mind. Some of the ideas are relevant from an application perspective (for sure, we have complex socio-technical systems where different 'agents' interact), others make it into learning, for example into RL, which was hyped some years go. Other ideas feel old-fashioned and stuck in the past; this is, in my opinion, not necessarily because the ideas are generally bad, but often because some of the sub-communities move very slowly and struggle to embrace a pragmatic approach to modern applied research. Generally, I think it's good to maintain 'old' knowledge, and the only way to do so in a sustainable manner is to maintain a diversity of research directions, where plenty of researchers are committed to keep the lights on by slowly advancing directions that are not on top of the hype cycle at the moment.
NelsonMinar 4y ago
I haven't heard anyone talk about this book in a long time. I read it while a grad student at the MIT Media Lab in the 90s (albeit not his course). I struggled to understand its relevance even then. I think for many people that book was an introduction to ideas about multi-agent and distributed systems. I'd already had that and didn't feel the book added much to the discussion other than introducing the idea. Academia has fashions. I feel like agent based systems will have their day again, perhaps with each agent backed by a deep learning system. It'll be easier to reason about than "convolve all these deep learning systems in a giant impenentrable network". That may be good or it may be bad. Minsky is of course infamous for having killed neural networks for a whole generation of researchers. He lived long enough to see their resurgence, I wonder if he commented on that?
- mtraven 4y ago
  Logical Versus Analogical or Symbolic Versus Connectionist or Neat Versus Scruffy: https://ojs.aaai.org//index.php/aimagazine/article/view/894 https://ojs.aaai.org//index.php/aimagazine/article/view/894 (from 1991, and a response to the revival of connectionism that happened in the late 80s). I often wonder what Minsky would think about the current generation of AI. My guess is that he'd be critical, because while their accomplishments are pretty impressive on the surface, they do very little to explain the mechanics of how humans perform complex problem solving, or really any kind of psychological model at all, and that is what he was really interested in. This has been a methodological problem with neural net approaches for many generations now. Minsky was as much a psychologist as a mathematician/engineer – Society of Mind owed a lot to Freud. That style of thinking seems to have dropped by the wayside, maybe for good reasons, but it's also kind of a shame. I'm not sure what insights you get into the human mind from building LLMs, powerful though they may be. For more of Minsky's thoughts on human intelligence, here's a recent book that collected some of his writings on education: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4519/Inventive-MindsMarvin-Minsky-on-Education https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4519/Inventive-MindsMarvin... (disclaimer: I wrote the introduction).
  - ghaff 4y ago
    >My guess is that he'd be critical, because while their accomplishments are pretty impressive on the surface, they do very little to explain the mechanics of how humans perform complex problem solving, or really any kind of psychological model at all, and that is what he was really interested in. The success of machine learning/neural nets--in no small part because of the amount of computation resources we can throw at them--has really led to hogging the attention compared to fields like cognitive science, neurophysiology, and so forth. Work is certainly going on in other areas but I'm still struck that some of the questions that were being asked when I took brain science as an undergrad many decades ago (e.g. how do we recognize a face as a face?) are still being asked today. Given that ML is the thing that's getting the flashy results, it's not surprising it's the thing in a limelight--even if there's a suspicion that it maybe (probably?) only gets you so far without better understanding how learning happens in people (and other animals) and other aspects of thinking and intelligence.
mooneater 4y ago
Sounds similar to what Google's SayCan is doing. https://say-can.github.io/ https://say-can.github.io/ They taught it separate skills. When a situation arises, the skills (which you could almost consider sub-agents) compete to decide who is most likely to be relevant here. Then that skill takes over for a bit. They also have a version called "Inner Monologue" in which the different parts "talk to each other" in the sense of collaboratively creating a single inner monologue, allowing for reactiveness/closed loop behaviour. I interviewed 2 authors of SayCan/Inner Monologue here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/karol-hausman-and-fei-xia/id1478198107?i=1000576283505 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/karol-hausman-and-fei-...
cs702 4y ago
Funnily enough, I'm currently trying to make my way through a preprint showing that models of dense associate memory with bipartite structure, including Transformers (!!!), are a special case of a more general routing algorithm that implements a "block of agents" in a differentiable model of Minsky's Society of Mind: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.11754 https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.11754. Maybe "symbolic" and "connectionist" AI are two sides of the same coin? EDIT: I feel compelled to mention that the efficient implementation of that more general routing algorithm can handle input sequences with more than 1M token embeddings in a single GPU, which quite frankly seems like it should be impossible but somehow it works: https://github.com/glassroom/heinsen_routing#routing-very-long-sequences https://github.com/glassroom/heinsen_routing#routing-very-lo....
- dpflan 4y ago
  Thank you. If you gain any insights while reading, please share!
  - cs702 4y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34127486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34127486
- eigenvalue 4y ago
  Wow, this sounds exactly like what I was talking about. Thanks for the reference.
  - cs702 4y ago
    :-) For those reading this after-the-fact, this thread started as a response to eigenvalue's original headline, a question, which was subsequently moved to a separate comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34110868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34110868
- p1esk 4y ago
  How does his routing algorithm compare to attention? I saw this question in the repo faq, but no satisfactory answer is given.
btown 4y ago
In a way, any GAN (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network) has aspects of a Society of Mind: two different networks communicating with each other, with the discriminator attempting to find flaws with the generator's ongoing output. And https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C31&as_vis=1&q=%22gan%22+%22multiple+discriminators%22&btnG= https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C31&as_vi... shows many attempts to generalize this to multiple adversarial agents specializing in different types of critique. One of the challenges, I think, is that while some of these agents could interact with the world, it's just far more rapid for training if they just use their own (imperfect) models of the relevant subset of the world to give answers instantaneously. Bridging this to increasingly dynamic physical environments and arbitrary tasks is a fascinating topic for research.
Barrin92 4y ago
I don't think the work has become irrelevant at all. ML models are fine but they're really just big function approximators. In the context of Minsky's book they're the sort of processes or agents which when put together and interacting could maybe constitute a generally intelligent system. Which is how they actually tend to be used in the real world already, as parts of more complex systems that interact or communicate.
abudabi123 4y ago
You can follow a lecture series at MIT presented by Marvin Minsky on Ai. I think it was recorded before Nvidia fitted GPUs in a shoe box and changed the game and the price.
LesZedCB 4y ago
it reminds me a little bit of the thousand brains theory from Numenta. we'll see what they turn out in the future. i think philosophically they're a closer match to minsky.
codetrotter 4y ago
> Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind" is a theoretical framework for understanding the nature of intelligence and how it arises from the interaction of simpler processes. The concept suggests that the mind is not a single entity, but rather a society of many different agents or processes that work together to produce intelligent behavior. > The concept of a "Society of Mind" is still relevant today and has influenced a number of fields, including artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and philosophy. It has also influenced the development of artificial intelligence systems that are designed to mimic the way the human mind works, using techniques such as artificial neural networks and machine learning. > Overall, the concept of a "Society of Mind" continues to be an important and influential idea in the study of intelligence and the nature of the mind. Or so at least, says ChatGPT when I asked it about this just now.
- Simplicitas 4y ago
  How long before "ChatGPT" is just "Chat", as in "I just asked Chat and it said ..."?
  - lhuser123 4y ago
    I hope never. But we really like to make things harder by giving the same name to many things.
  - jaredsohn 4y ago
    Won't they just give it a name? i.e Siri, Alexa, Jeeves Just noticed that GPT sounds a little like Jeeves.
    - infradig 4y ago
      Or gipped (polite spelling), as in you've been had.
sdwr 4y ago
This post is fucking catnip for me. I still believe society of mind is due for a huge resurgence, due to exactly what you're saying. Bottom-up composable skills will be a huge step forward, and free up GPT etc to be creative while getting the low-level stuff 100% correct (instead of screwing up arithmetic half the time) The inverse side of the coin is emotions, meaningful relationships, and wisdom, which I think work in similar way but more diffuse. There can be a horny submodule that analyzes incoming content for sexual context, one for anger, fear, gratitude, etc. The same way an image processor convolves over pixels looking for edges and features, an emotional processor will operate over data looking for changes in relationships. Feelings act like filters on incoming data, and are composed out of base physiological reactions. Like anger involves adrenaline, which increases pain tolerance and dampens conscious thought in favor of subconscious and instant reactions.
- FredPret 4y ago
  This makes so much intuitive sense to me. I love society of mind, I wonder if it bears a relationship to how the human mind works
  - tern 4y ago
    Absolutely, see Internal Family Systems. With a little practice, you can empirically determine that this is how your mind and emotions work. https://ifs-institute.com/ https://ifs-institute.com/
- sdwr 4y ago
  Edit: society of mind is a great launching point for AI alignment as well. If there are internal processes that "care" about/sense different things, how do they work together? 1. Bidding system. Subsystems parse incoming info, and pay to bubble their need/plan into consciousness/action 2. Nested levels of concern, ex. maslow's hierarchy 3. "Recipes" that combine output from multiple subsystems. Learning recipes via subconscious communication / mirroring. I get the sense AI alignment is too focused on the fantastical end-of-the-world catastrophe scenario. It's impossible to get anything actually done vs a vision of apocalypse. The real strides are going to come from operational safety and "open enough" reasoning, not "how do I know that its not lying about lying about..." paranoid recursing.
endlessvoid94 4y ago
I just might have to dust off the copy on my shelf and give it a re-read.
neilv 4y ago
Also look at his later book, "The Emotion Machine". When I took Minsky's "Society of Mind" class, he was working on the later book, and many lectures were him talking about what he had been working on earlier that day.
XMPPwocky 4y ago
https://socraticmodels.github.io/ https://socraticmodels.github.io/ seems somewhat related, using a LLM as the top-level model.
bryan0 4y ago
Im not an expert in this field, but I think things have actually gone in the other direction. Look at IBM’s Watson (which won on jeopardy), and it was a system which consisted of diverse agents which would all evaluate the question in their own way and report back a result and a confidence score. Now look at GPT, it is transformers all the way down and it is doing much more diverse things than Watson could ever do. So I think the key is not in the diversity of agents, but in the diversity of data representations. GPT is limited by the text representing language, but what if you could train on data even more fundamental and expressive
lisper 4y ago
I was a grad student in AI at the time this book came out so I can tell you a little bit about the historical context from my personal perspective with benefit of hindsight. The field at the time was dominated by two schools of thought, called the "neats" and the "scruffies". At the risk of significant oversimplification, the neats thought that the right way to do AI was using formal logic while the scruffies took an empirical approach: noodle around with code and see what works. Both approaches led to interesting results. The neat legacy is modern-day theorem provers while the scruffy legacy is chatbots, self-driving cars, and neural nets. SoM didn't fit neatly (no pun intended) into either camp. It wasn't empirical and it wasn't formal. It was just a collection of random loosely-associated ideas and nothing ever came of it. It was too informal to lead to interesting theoretical results, and it was too vague to be implemented and so no one could test it experimentally. And both of those things are still true today. I think it's fair to say that if the author had been anyone but Minsky no one would have paid any attention to it at all.
- varjag 4y ago
  Well it did spur the research into multi-agent systems (popular study area in 1990s) and interaction protocols. So there was a degree of influence. But taken on its own it is indeed more a book of musings. I put GEB, ANKOS and the like into the same genre.
  - lisper 4y ago
    I'm with you on ANKOS, but GEB is an accessible and fun (if a bit wordy) introduction to formal systems and Godel's theorem, so I wouldn't put it in the same category. GEB also was not marketed as anything revolutionary (except in its pedagogy). ANKOS and SoM were.
- detourdog 4y ago
  Inspired me as an undergrad Industrial Design student in 1989ish that and The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at M.I.T by Stewart Brand were the two most influential technology books for me at that time. Coincidentally enough it turns out my cousin was in the thick of it while the pre-media lab was still part of the architecture school. She would tell me stories of what she was up to in college... when I read that back I had to loop back and ask her about it.
schizo89 4y ago
Minsky is hand waiver to say the least.
naillo 4y ago
Minsky's "Society of Mind" is still relevant today, IMO. It's a provocative idea that explains the complexity of the human mind as a society of simpler processes working together. In AI, it's inspired researchers to try and build systems with lots of interconnected, simple processes that work together like the human mind. And in cognitive psychology, it's a key concept that's helped researchers understand the mind as a complex network of simpler processes.
EliasY 4y ago
I believe "the society of mind" contains a bunch of really good but unorganized ideas for building intelligent models, but was written in such a way that it remained virtually impossible to implement them into a working program. Minsky's last book called "The Emotion Machine" tries to reorganize these ideas into one giant architecture composed of at least five interconnected macrolevels of cognitive processes built from specialized agents. Having said that, "The Society of Mind" is one of the most difficult books I've read.
dr_dshiv 4y ago
One of the first AI proposals was from Oliver Selfridge. He called it Pandemonium because it was a set of demons (into processes) and the loudest demon was successful. In response, Paul Smolensky made the “Harmonium”—which was the first restricted Boltzmann machine. There whichever process produces the most harmony among the elements was successful. It’s still a really great paper. Harmony maximization was the same as free energy minimization. When Smolensky and Hinton collaborated (they were both Postdocs under David Rummelhart and Don Norman at UCSD), they called it “goodness of fit.” Still used today!
- eigenvalue 4y ago
  Interesting! I started reading through this pdf after reading your comment here and it has a lot of cool ideas: https://stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/PDP/Volume%201/Chap6_PDP86.pdf https://stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/PDP/Volume%201/Chap6_PDP8...
  - dr_dshiv 4y ago
    Did you get a takeaway on society of mind? I’ve been curious about the topic of distributed cognition and non-individualism in philosophy. When we don’t think that we have a single unified soul/psyche/self, then a lot of really interesting and fairly practical things happen. It’s easier to change one’s mind, for instance—and even death is less of a concern (since the essential parts of one’s self are still rather living).
matusp 4y ago
You can argue that there might be some similarities or analogies to be made. But that's it. The book is actually very irrelevant and it had literally no impact on how these new systems were created and conceptualized.
scottlocklin 4y ago
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1letterunixname 4y ago
The technological singularity is close for purely automate-able processes. General AI, either in the form mimicking humans or a "being" similar is a ways off, amorphous, and far off for what people might see portrayed in fiction. One also has to ponder the functional definitions of self-awareness, intelligence(s), and consciousness as not magical but as emergent properties of the "individual" inferred by others through behaviors, especially communication. It is anthropocentric and arrogant to assume other agents are lesser or incapable simply by lacking a common language or mutual behavioral understanding. Learning and optimization for improving one's power and resources (fitness function, gradient vectors, bank account balance;), etc.), especially through play and speed of adaptation through feedback would be strong signals of this.
squokko 4y ago
Society of Mind is just a bunch of unfalsifiable speculations... more New Age mysticism than science or engineering. Not sure how it would have any impact
FredPret 4y ago
The society of agents idea helped me understand politics more. Of course he applies the idea to a single mind where each agent is a neuron / set of neurons, and in politics each agent is a mind.
tern 4y ago
In a clinical setting, the idea is alive and well in the form of Internal Family Systems and other "parts work." I wouldn't be surprised if microservices come from the same root of inspiration as well, via object oriented programming (message passing), etc. The very idea of intelligence arising from communicating parts I think originated from that time-period and has influenced many fields, though there could be earlier references.
dang 4y ago
Related: The Society of Mind (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30586391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30586391 - March 2022 (37 comments) The Society of Mind - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12050936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12050936 - July 2016 (2 comments) Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind Lectures - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10971310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10971310 - Jan 2016 (6 comments) The Society of Mind (1988) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8877144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8877144 - Jan 2015 (6 comments) The Society of Mind Video Lectures - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8668750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8668750 - Nov 2014 (10 comments) Marvin Minsky's "The Society of Mind" now CC licensed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6846505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6846505 - Dec 2013 (2 comments) MIT OCW:The Society of Mind (Graduate Course by Minsky) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=856714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=856714 - Oct 2009 (2 comments)
eigenvalue 4y ago
Minsky wrote this book in 1986, towards the end of his very long career thinking about how to build intelligent machines. For a basic overview, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind You can find a complete pdf of the book here: http://www.acad.bg/ebook/ml/Society%20of%20Mind.pdf http://www.acad.bg/ebook/ml/Society%20of%20Mind.pdf My question to the HN community is, has all this work become irrelevant given recent progress in machine learning, particularly with Transformer based models such as GPT-3 or "mixed modality" models such as Gato? It seems to me that some of these ideas could make a comeback in the context of a group of interacting models/agents that can pass each other messages. You could have a kind of "top level" master model that responds to a request from a human (e.g., "I just spilled soda on my desk, please help me") and then figures out a reasonable course of action. Then the master model issues requests to various "specialist models" that are trained on particular kinds of tasks, such as an image based model for exploring an area to look for a sponge, or a feedback control model that is trained to grasp the sponge, etc. Or in a more relevant scenario to how this tech is being widely used today, a GitHub Copilot type agent might have an embedded REPL and then could recruit an "expert debugging" agent which is particularly good at figuring out what caused an error and how to modify the code to avoid the error and fix the bug. I suppose the alternative is that we skip this altogether and just train a single enormous Transformer model that does all of this stuff internally, so that it's all hidden from the user, and everything is learned at the same time during end-to-end training.
mindcrime 4y ago
I've read this book a couple of times, with my most recent re-read being within the last year or two. So I guess that means that I, for one at least, find something of value in SofM even now. So the question then might be "what do you find valuable in it?" That would take a lot of words to answer fully, but let me start by saying that I agree with a lot of the other comments in on this post. The theory, inasmuch as you can call it that, isn't super concrete, isn't necessarily something you can implement directly as such, does mostly lack any kind of experimental evidence, and is kind of hand wavy. Sooooo... what value does it have? Well for me it's mostly something I look at as inspirational from a very high-level, abstract point of view. It strikes me as more of a framework that could support very many theories, rather than a specific realizable theory. But I believe that there's something fundamentally correct (or at least useful) about the idea of a collections of semi-autonomous agents collaborating in a style akin to SofM. And on top of that, I think there are at least a handful of specific notions contained in the book that might be realizable and might prove useful. If you want a specific example, I'd say that I think something like K-lines may prove useful. Of course I have no experimental evidence, or much of anything else beyond intuition, to support my beliefs in this. And I'm just one random guy who's pretty much a nobody in the AI field. I just sit quietly at my computer and work, not really trying to attract a lot of attention. And in the process of doing so, I do occasionally consult Society of Mind. YMMV. And just to be clear in case anybody wants to misinterpret what I'm saying. It's not my "bible", and I'm not a Minsky acolyte, and I don't consider SofM to be the "be all end all" any more than I consider A New Kind of Science, Godel Escher, Bach, Hands on Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras & Tensorflow, Computational Approaches to Analogical Reasoning: Current Trends, or Parallel Distributed Processing, Vol. 1: Foundations to be the "be all, end all". I'm all about applying Bruce Lee's mantra: "Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it."
SrslyJosh 4y ago
Unfortunately, Minsky's work is tainted by his association with Jeffrey Epstein: https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/9/20798900/marvin-minsky-jeffrey-epstein-sex-trafficking-island-court-records-unsealed https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/9/20798900/marvin-minsky-jef...
- jacquesm 4y ago
  I'm not sure if that sticks though. From Minsky's Wikipedia page: "There has been no allegation that sex between them took place nor a lawsuit against Minsky's estate. Minsky's widow, Gloria Rudisch, says that he could not have had sex with any of the women at Epstein's residences, as they were always together during all of the visits to Epstein's residences."
eternityforest 4y ago
I think this is a great framework to explain dyspraxia. It's not a matter of getting distracted, or slow thinking, it's random failures in each component part. You don't get distracted and forget what number you were counting, you jump from 5 to 7 because the increment process is unreliable. It's not that you "Aren't paying attention", you let the pot boil over because your agent that watches the environment in the background randomly left the office because you thought about something else for a brief moment and the agent that manages the stack and returns to the previous task went on vacation. Your conscious experience is the same, but you can take wildly incorrect actions because whatever agent gave you the data is wrong.

159 points by eigenvalue 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

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dev_0 4y ago

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bhouston 4y ago

I think it is an interesting idea and it is sort of akin to Freud's ego, superego, subconscious, etc. It is a conceptualization, an abstraction, probably a little arbitrary, that does not map well to physical constructs. To view it from the perspective of deep learning neural networks, one would view the society of mind as a proposed super structure on top of the various deep learning neutral networks. There is this already, like the reinforcement learning structure for Chat GPT, or the multi-focus attentional systems used for code generation. As we built out a full AGI that can interact with the whole, it is likely we will have specialized systems which mimic a society of mind, but given that Minsky's ideas are pretty rough and sort of vague, I am not sure his writings provide the best guidance, but probably can inspire a bit of work.

edgyquant 4y ago
Think of humans as artificial neurons. Language is how we back propagate etc

lolc 4y ago

I've been wondering about this too. The book gave me a way to think about consciousness, but I do wonder whether we'll ever see machines that use concepts at the described level. Because humans don't seem to be built that way, and the models we've built so far don't either.

timkam 4y ago

There is still plenty of research going on on agents, symbolic AI, and other approaches that sometimes and somewhat reflect (or have informed) ideas from Society of Mind. Some of the ideas are relevant from an application perspective (for sure, we have complex socio-technical systems where different 'agents' interact), others make it into learning, for example into RL, which was hyped some years go. Other ideas feel old-fashioned and stuck in the past; this is, in my opinion, not necessarily because the ideas are generally bad, but often because some of the sub-communities move very slowly and struggle to embrace a pragmatic approach to modern applied research. Generally, I think it's good to maintain 'old' knowledge, and the only way to do so in a sustainable manner is to maintain a diversity of research directions, where plenty of researchers are committed to keep the lights on by slowly advancing directions that are not on top of the hype cycle at the moment.

NelsonMinar 4y ago

I haven't heard anyone talk about this book in a long time. I read it while a grad student at the MIT Media Lab in the 90s (albeit not his course). I struggled to understand its relevance even then. I think for many people that book was an introduction to ideas about multi-agent and distributed systems. I'd already had that and didn't feel the book added much to the discussion other than introducing the idea. Academia has fashions. I feel like agent based systems will have their day again, perhaps with each agent backed by a deep learning system. It'll be easier to reason about than "convolve all these deep learning systems in a giant impenentrable network". That may be good or it may be bad. Minsky is of course infamous for having killed neural networks for a whole generation of researchers. He lived long enough to see their resurgence, I wonder if he commented on that?

mtraven 4y ago
Logical Versus Analogical or Symbolic Versus Connectionist or Neat Versus Scruffy: https://ojs.aaai.org//index.php/aimagazine/article/view/894 https://ojs.aaai.org//index.php/aimagazine/article/view/894 (from 1991, and a response to the revival of connectionism that happened in the late 80s). I often wonder what Minsky would think about the current generation of AI. My guess is that he'd be critical, because while their accomplishments are pretty impressive on the surface, they do very little to explain the mechanics of how humans perform complex problem solving, or really any kind of psychological model at all, and that is what he was really interested in. This has been a methodological problem with neural net approaches for many generations now. Minsky was as much a psychologist as a mathematician/engineer – Society of Mind owed a lot to Freud. That style of thinking seems to have dropped by the wayside, maybe for good reasons, but it's also kind of a shame. I'm not sure what insights you get into the human mind from building LLMs, powerful though they may be. For more of Minsky's thoughts on human intelligence, here's a recent book that collected some of his writings on education: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4519/Inventive-MindsMarvin-Minsky-on-Education https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4519/Inventive-MindsMarvin... (disclaimer: I wrote the introduction).
- ghaff 4y ago
  >My guess is that he'd be critical, because while their accomplishments are pretty impressive on the surface, they do very little to explain the mechanics of how humans perform complex problem solving, or really any kind of psychological model at all, and that is what he was really interested in. The success of machine learning/neural nets--in no small part because of the amount of computation resources we can throw at them--has really led to hogging the attention compared to fields like cognitive science, neurophysiology, and so forth. Work is certainly going on in other areas but I'm still struck that some of the questions that were being asked when I took brain science as an undergrad many decades ago (e.g. how do we recognize a face as a face?) are still being asked today. Given that ML is the thing that's getting the flashy results, it's not surprising it's the thing in a limelight--even if there's a suspicion that it maybe (probably?) only gets you so far without better understanding how learning happens in people (and other animals) and other aspects of thinking and intelligence.

mooneater 4y ago

Sounds similar to what Google's SayCan is doing. https://say-can.github.io/ https://say-can.github.io/ They taught it separate skills. When a situation arises, the skills (which you could almost consider sub-agents) compete to decide who is most likely to be relevant here. Then that skill takes over for a bit. They also have a version called "Inner Monologue" in which the different parts "talk to each other" in the sense of collaboratively creating a single inner monologue, allowing for reactiveness/closed loop behaviour. I interviewed 2 authors of SayCan/Inner Monologue here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/karol-hausman-and-fei-xia/id1478198107?i=1000576283505 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/karol-hausman-and-fei-...

cs702 4y ago

Funnily enough, I'm currently trying to make my way through a preprint showing that models of dense associate memory with bipartite structure, including Transformers (!!!), are a special case of a more general routing algorithm that implements a "block of agents" in a differentiable model of Minsky's Society of Mind: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.11754 https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.11754. Maybe "symbolic" and "connectionist" AI are two sides of the same coin? EDIT: I feel compelled to mention that the efficient implementation of that more general routing algorithm can handle input sequences with more than 1M token embeddings in a single GPU, which quite frankly seems like it should be impossible but somehow it works: https://github.com/glassroom/heinsen_routing#routing-very-long-sequences https://github.com/glassroom/heinsen_routing#routing-very-lo....

dpflan 4y ago
Thank you. If you gain any insights while reading, please share!
- cs702 4y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34127486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34127486
eigenvalue 4y ago
Wow, this sounds exactly like what I was talking about. Thanks for the reference.
- cs702 4y ago
  :-) For those reading this after-the-fact, this thread started as a response to eigenvalue's original headline, a question, which was subsequently moved to a separate comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34110868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34110868
p1esk 4y ago
How does his routing algorithm compare to attention? I saw this question in the repo faq, but no satisfactory answer is given.

btown 4y ago

In a way, any GAN (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network) has aspects of a Society of Mind: two different networks communicating with each other, with the discriminator attempting to find flaws with the generator's ongoing output. And https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C31&as_vis=1&q=%22gan%22+%22multiple+discriminators%22&btnG= https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C31&as_vi... shows many attempts to generalize this to multiple adversarial agents specializing in different types of critique. One of the challenges, I think, is that while some of these agents could interact with the world, it's just far more rapid for training if they just use their own (imperfect) models of the relevant subset of the world to give answers instantaneously. Bridging this to increasingly dynamic physical environments and arbitrary tasks is a fascinating topic for research.

Barrin92 4y ago

I don't think the work has become irrelevant at all. ML models are fine but they're really just big function approximators. In the context of Minsky's book they're the sort of processes or agents which when put together and interacting could maybe constitute a generally intelligent system. Which is how they actually tend to be used in the real world already, as parts of more complex systems that interact or communicate.

abudabi123 4y ago

You can follow a lecture series at MIT presented by Marvin Minsky on Ai. I think it was recorded before Nvidia fitted GPUs in a shoe box and changed the game and the price.

LesZedCB 4y ago

it reminds me a little bit of the thousand brains theory from Numenta. we'll see what they turn out in the future. i think philosophically they're a closer match to minsky.

codetrotter 4y ago

> Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind" is a theoretical framework for understanding the nature of intelligence and how it arises from the interaction of simpler processes. The concept suggests that the mind is not a single entity, but rather a society of many different agents or processes that work together to produce intelligent behavior. > The concept of a "Society of Mind" is still relevant today and has influenced a number of fields, including artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and philosophy. It has also influenced the development of artificial intelligence systems that are designed to mimic the way the human mind works, using techniques such as artificial neural networks and machine learning. > Overall, the concept of a "Society of Mind" continues to be an important and influential idea in the study of intelligence and the nature of the mind. Or so at least, says ChatGPT when I asked it about this just now.

Simplicitas 4y ago
How long before "ChatGPT" is just "Chat", as in "I just asked Chat and it said ..."?
- lhuser123 4y ago
  I hope never. But we really like to make things harder by giving the same name to many things.
- jaredsohn 4y ago
  Won't they just give it a name? i.e Siri, Alexa, Jeeves Just noticed that GPT sounds a little like Jeeves.
  - infradig 4y ago
    Or gipped (polite spelling), as in you've been had.

sdwr 4y ago

This post is fucking catnip for me. I still believe society of mind is due for a huge resurgence, due to exactly what you're saying. Bottom-up composable skills will be a huge step forward, and free up GPT etc to be creative while getting the low-level stuff 100% correct (instead of screwing up arithmetic half the time) The inverse side of the coin is emotions, meaningful relationships, and wisdom, which I think work in similar way but more diffuse. There can be a horny submodule that analyzes incoming content for sexual context, one for anger, fear, gratitude, etc. The same way an image processor convolves over pixels looking for edges and features, an emotional processor will operate over data looking for changes in relationships. Feelings act like filters on incoming data, and are composed out of base physiological reactions. Like anger involves adrenaline, which increases pain tolerance and dampens conscious thought in favor of subconscious and instant reactions.

FredPret 4y ago
This makes so much intuitive sense to me. I love society of mind, I wonder if it bears a relationship to how the human mind works
- tern 4y ago
  Absolutely, see Internal Family Systems. With a little practice, you can empirically determine that this is how your mind and emotions work. https://ifs-institute.com/ https://ifs-institute.com/
sdwr 4y ago
Edit: society of mind is a great launching point for AI alignment as well. If there are internal processes that "care" about/sense different things, how do they work together? 1. Bidding system. Subsystems parse incoming info, and pay to bubble their need/plan into consciousness/action 2. Nested levels of concern, ex. maslow's hierarchy 3. "Recipes" that combine output from multiple subsystems. Learning recipes via subconscious communication / mirroring. I get the sense AI alignment is too focused on the fantastical end-of-the-world catastrophe scenario. It's impossible to get anything actually done vs a vision of apocalypse. The real strides are going to come from operational safety and "open enough" reasoning, not "how do I know that its not lying about lying about..." paranoid recursing.

endlessvoid94 4y ago

I just might have to dust off the copy on my shelf and give it a re-read.

neilv 4y ago

Also look at his later book, "The Emotion Machine". When I took Minsky's "Society of Mind" class, he was working on the later book, and many lectures were him talking about what he had been working on earlier that day.

XMPPwocky 4y ago

https://socraticmodels.github.io/ https://socraticmodels.github.io/ seems somewhat related, using a LLM as the top-level model.

bryan0 4y ago

Im not an expert in this field, but I think things have actually gone in the other direction. Look at IBM’s Watson (which won on jeopardy), and it was a system which consisted of diverse agents which would all evaluate the question in their own way and report back a result and a confidence score. Now look at GPT, it is transformers all the way down and it is doing much more diverse things than Watson could ever do. So I think the key is not in the diversity of agents, but in the diversity of data representations. GPT is limited by the text representing language, but what if you could train on data even more fundamental and expressive

lisper 4y ago

I was a grad student in AI at the time this book came out so I can tell you a little bit about the historical context from my personal perspective with benefit of hindsight. The field at the time was dominated by two schools of thought, called the "neats" and the "scruffies". At the risk of significant oversimplification, the neats thought that the right way to do AI was using formal logic while the scruffies took an empirical approach: noodle around with code and see what works. Both approaches led to interesting results. The neat legacy is modern-day theorem provers while the scruffy legacy is chatbots, self-driving cars, and neural nets. SoM didn't fit neatly (no pun intended) into either camp. It wasn't empirical and it wasn't formal. It was just a collection of random loosely-associated ideas and nothing ever came of it. It was too informal to lead to interesting theoretical results, and it was too vague to be implemented and so no one could test it experimentally. And both of those things are still true today. I think it's fair to say that if the author had been anyone but Minsky no one would have paid any attention to it at all.

varjag 4y ago
Well it did spur the research into multi-agent systems (popular study area in 1990s) and interaction protocols. So there was a degree of influence. But taken on its own it is indeed more a book of musings. I put GEB, ANKOS and the like into the same genre.
- lisper 4y ago
  I'm with you on ANKOS, but GEB is an accessible and fun (if a bit wordy) introduction to formal systems and Godel's theorem, so I wouldn't put it in the same category. GEB also was not marketed as anything revolutionary (except in its pedagogy). ANKOS and SoM were.
detourdog 4y ago
Inspired me as an undergrad Industrial Design student in 1989ish that and The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at M.I.T by Stewart Brand were the two most influential technology books for me at that time. Coincidentally enough it turns out my cousin was in the thick of it while the pre-media lab was still part of the architecture school. She would tell me stories of what she was up to in college... when I read that back I had to loop back and ask her about it.

schizo89 4y ago

Minsky is hand waiver to say the least.

naillo 4y ago

Minsky's "Society of Mind" is still relevant today, IMO. It's a provocative idea that explains the complexity of the human mind as a society of simpler processes working together. In AI, it's inspired researchers to try and build systems with lots of interconnected, simple processes that work together like the human mind. And in cognitive psychology, it's a key concept that's helped researchers understand the mind as a complex network of simpler processes.

EliasY 4y ago

I believe "the society of mind" contains a bunch of really good but unorganized ideas for building intelligent models, but was written in such a way that it remained virtually impossible to implement them into a working program. Minsky's last book called "The Emotion Machine" tries to reorganize these ideas into one giant architecture composed of at least five interconnected macrolevels of cognitive processes built from specialized agents. Having said that, "The Society of Mind" is one of the most difficult books I've read.

dr_dshiv 4y ago

One of the first AI proposals was from Oliver Selfridge. He called it Pandemonium because it was a set of demons (into processes) and the loudest demon was successful. In response, Paul Smolensky made the “Harmonium”—which was the first restricted Boltzmann machine. There whichever process produces the most harmony among the elements was successful. It’s still a really great paper. Harmony maximization was the same as free energy minimization. When Smolensky and Hinton collaborated (they were both Postdocs under David Rummelhart and Don Norman at UCSD), they called it “goodness of fit.” Still used today!

eigenvalue 4y ago
Interesting! I started reading through this pdf after reading your comment here and it has a lot of cool ideas: https://stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/PDP/Volume%201/Chap6_PDP86.pdf https://stanford.edu/~jlmcc/papers/PDP/Volume%201/Chap6_PDP8...
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  Did you get a takeaway on society of mind? I’ve been curious about the topic of distributed cognition and non-individualism in philosophy. When we don’t think that we have a single unified soul/psyche/self, then a lot of really interesting and fairly practical things happen. It’s easier to change one’s mind, for instance—and even death is less of a concern (since the essential parts of one’s self are still rather living).

matusp 4y ago

You can argue that there might be some similarities or analogies to be made. But that's it. The book is actually very irrelevant and it had literally no impact on how these new systems were created and conceptualized.

scottlocklin 4y ago

[dead]

1letterunixname 4y ago

The technological singularity is close for purely automate-able processes. General AI, either in the form mimicking humans or a "being" similar is a ways off, amorphous, and far off for what people might see portrayed in fiction. One also has to ponder the functional definitions of self-awareness, intelligence(s), and consciousness as not magical but as emergent properties of the "individual" inferred by others through behaviors, especially communication. It is anthropocentric and arrogant to assume other agents are lesser or incapable simply by lacking a common language or mutual behavioral understanding. Learning and optimization for improving one's power and resources (fitness function, gradient vectors, bank account balance;), etc.), especially through play and speed of adaptation through feedback would be strong signals of this.

squokko 4y ago

Society of Mind is just a bunch of unfalsifiable speculations... more New Age mysticism than science or engineering. Not sure how it would have any impact

FredPret 4y ago

The society of agents idea helped me understand politics more. Of course he applies the idea to a single mind where each agent is a neuron / set of neurons, and in politics each agent is a mind.

tern 4y ago

In a clinical setting, the idea is alive and well in the form of Internal Family Systems and other "parts work." I wouldn't be surprised if microservices come from the same root of inspiration as well, via object oriented programming (message passing), etc. The very idea of intelligence arising from communicating parts I think originated from that time-period and has influenced many fields, though there could be earlier references.

dang 4y ago

Related: The Society of Mind (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30586391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30586391 - March 2022 (37 comments) The Society of Mind - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12050936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12050936 - July 2016 (2 comments) Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind Lectures - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10971310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10971310 - Jan 2016 (6 comments) The Society of Mind (1988) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8877144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8877144 - Jan 2015 (6 comments) The Society of Mind Video Lectures - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8668750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8668750 - Nov 2014 (10 comments) Marvin Minsky's "The Society of Mind" now CC licensed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6846505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6846505 - Dec 2013 (2 comments) MIT OCW:The Society of Mind (Graduate Course by Minsky) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=856714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=856714 - Oct 2009 (2 comments)

eigenvalue 4y ago

Minsky wrote this book in 1986, towards the end of his very long career thinking about how to build intelligent machines. For a basic overview, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind You can find a complete pdf of the book here: http://www.acad.bg/ebook/ml/Society%20of%20Mind.pdf http://www.acad.bg/ebook/ml/Society%20of%20Mind.pdf My question to the HN community is, has all this work become irrelevant given recent progress in machine learning, particularly with Transformer based models such as GPT-3 or "mixed modality" models such as Gato? It seems to me that some of these ideas could make a comeback in the context of a group of interacting models/agents that can pass each other messages. You could have a kind of "top level" master model that responds to a request from a human (e.g., "I just spilled soda on my desk, please help me") and then figures out a reasonable course of action. Then the master model issues requests to various "specialist models" that are trained on particular kinds of tasks, such as an image based model for exploring an area to look for a sponge, or a feedback control model that is trained to grasp the sponge, etc. Or in a more relevant scenario to how this tech is being widely used today, a GitHub Copilot type agent might have an embedded REPL and then could recruit an "expert debugging" agent which is particularly good at figuring out what caused an error and how to modify the code to avoid the error and fix the bug. I suppose the alternative is that we skip this altogether and just train a single enormous Transformer model that does all of this stuff internally, so that it's all hidden from the user, and everything is learned at the same time during end-to-end training.

mindcrime 4y ago

I've read this book a couple of times, with my most recent re-read being within the last year or two. So I guess that means that I, for one at least, find something of value in SofM even now. So the question then might be "what do you find valuable in it?" That would take a lot of words to answer fully, but let me start by saying that I agree with a lot of the other comments in on this post. The theory, inasmuch as you can call it that, isn't super concrete, isn't necessarily something you can implement directly as such, does mostly lack any kind of experimental evidence, and is kind of hand wavy. Sooooo... what value does it have? Well for me it's mostly something I look at as inspirational from a very high-level, abstract point of view. It strikes me as more of a framework that could support very many theories, rather than a specific realizable theory. But I believe that there's something fundamentally correct (or at least useful) about the idea of a collections of semi-autonomous agents collaborating in a style akin to SofM. And on top of that, I think there are at least a handful of specific notions contained in the book that might be realizable and might prove useful. If you want a specific example, I'd say that I think something like K-lines may prove useful. Of course I have no experimental evidence, or much of anything else beyond intuition, to support my beliefs in this. And I'm just one random guy who's pretty much a nobody in the AI field. I just sit quietly at my computer and work, not really trying to attract a lot of attention. And in the process of doing so, I do occasionally consult Society of Mind. YMMV. And just to be clear in case anybody wants to misinterpret what I'm saying. It's not my "bible", and I'm not a Minsky acolyte, and I don't consider SofM to be the "be all end all" any more than I consider A New Kind of Science, Godel Escher, Bach, Hands on Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras & Tensorflow, Computational Approaches to Analogical Reasoning: Current Trends, or Parallel Distributed Processing, Vol. 1: Foundations to be the "be all, end all". I'm all about applying Bruce Lee's mantra: "Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it."

SrslyJosh 4y ago

Unfortunately, Minsky's work is tainted by his association with Jeffrey Epstein: https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/9/20798900/marvin-minsky-jeffrey-epstein-sex-trafficking-island-court-records-unsealed https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/9/20798900/marvin-minsky-jef...

jacquesm 4y ago
I'm not sure if that sticks though. From Minsky's Wikipedia page: "There has been no allegation that sex between them took place nor a lawsuit against Minsky's estate. Minsky's widow, Gloria Rudisch, says that he could not have had sex with any of the women at Epstein's residences, as they were always together during all of the visits to Epstein's residences."

eternityforest 4y ago

I think this is a great framework to explain dyspraxia. It's not a matter of getting distracted, or slow thinking, it's random failures in each component part. You don't get distracted and forget what number you were counting, you jump from 5 to 7 because the increment process is unreliable. It's not that you "Aren't paying attention", you let the pot boil over because your agent that watches the environment in the background randomly left the office because you thought about something else for a brief moment and the agent that manages the stack and returns to the previous task went on vacation. Your conscious experience is the same, but you can take wildly incorrect actions because whatever agent gave you the data is wrong.