Revisiting Minsky's Society of Mind in 2025
A Teenager’s Frustration, a Researcher’s Revelation (Note: this is a deeply nerdy / technical post, with most applicability to folks building AI systems, and of little relevance to most users of AI.) In the late 90s, as a tech-obsessed teenager, I picked up Marvin Minsky’s 1986 book The Society of Mind expecting profound answers about intelligence. It was exciting: Minsky made AI seem so tractable, with beautiful essays arguing that the mind is composed of countless simple “agents” – little pr