#Marvin Minsky

The audacious, exhilarating, ultimately tragic story of the AI optimists of the 1960s — the people who genuinely believed that machine intelligence was years away, who made predictions that have made them famous for being wrong, and who were right about the destination even as they were spectacularly wrong about the distance.

His towering influence on early AI, his wildly overconfident predictions that a generation would see machine intelligence, the devastating critique of neural networks that set the field back a decade, and the late-career vision of the Society of Mind that remains one of the most original theories of intelligence ever proposed. The most complex figure in the history of AI.

The 1956 Dartmouth Conference in full narrative detail — who was in the room, what they argued about in the evenings, what they agreed on, what they were spectacularly wrong about, and how a single summer's conversation gave a field its name, its mission, and the overconfidence that would eventually send it into its first winter.