(Courtesy of Donna Coveney/MIT)

Marvin Minsky straddles the worlds of science and sci-fi. The MIT professor and artificial intelligence guru has influenced everyone from Isaac Asimov to the digital chess champ Deep Blue to computer movie star HAL of 2001: A Space Odyssey. He may be known around campus as "Old Man Minsky," but the scientist is just as active in AI research today as he was when he helped pioneer the field as a young man in the 1950s.

Although educated in mathematics, Minsky has always thought in terms of mind and machine. For his dissertation at Princeton University in the 1950s, he analyzed a "learning machine," meant to simulate the brain's neural networks, that he had constructed as an undergrad. In his early career he was also an influential inventor, creating the first confocal scanning microscope, a version of which is now standard in labs worldwide. In 1959 Minsky cofounded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, where he designed and built robotic hands that could "feel" and "see" and manipulate objects, a watershed in the field.

Throughout, Minsky has written philosophically on the subject of AI, culminating in the 1985 book Society of Mind, which summarizes his theory of how the mind works. He postulates that the complex phenomenon of thinking can be broken down into simple, specialized processes that work together like individuals in a society. His latest book, The Emotion Machine, continues ideas begun in Society of Mind, reflecting twenty-some additional years of thought. It is a blueprint for a thinking machine that Minsky would like to build—an artificial intelligence that can reflect on itself—taking us a step forward into a future that may seem as if out of an Asimov story.

What are your latest ideas about the mind, as set out in The Emotion Machine?