Marvin Minsky (1927-2016)
Filed under the name Marvin · March 17, 2026
Marvin Minsky co-founding MIT's AI lab decades before artificial intelligence became something everybody argues about at dinner tables is the kind of foundational work that mostly goes unnoticed by the general public until the field it built finally becomes impossible to ignore. I've got genuinely complicated feelings about self-driving truck technology, since it's professionally threatening to a guy like me while also being an engineering achievement I find honestly amazing, and Minsky's early research is part of the long chain of work that eventually led to exactly that tension existing in my own life. I try not to pick one feeling and pretend the other doesn't exist, because both are true at once — the technology could take my job someday, and it's also genuinely remarkable that it works at all. Being a foundational figure in a field this consequential means Minsky was asking the right early questions long before most people even knew there were questions worth asking, and that kind of early clarity is rare in any research field.