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?
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?