Marvin Minsky speaks

Has science fiction influenced your work?

It's about the only thing I read.  General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up.  Science fiction is about everything else.

That is from a fun interview, Discover magazine, January 2007.  Here is Minsky's new book.  What makes humans special, in his view, is that they have multiple and quite different ways of thinking about virtually any problem, including the mathetmatical, the literary, the symbolic, and so on.