MINSKY: ... Computer science is not really about computers at all, but about ways to describe processes. As soon as those computers appeared, this became an urgent need. Soon after that we recognized that this was also what we'd need to describe the processes that might be involved in human thinking, reasoning, memory, and pattern recognition, etc.
JB: You say 1950, but wouldn't this be preceded by the ideas floating around the Macy Conferences in the '40s?
MINSKY: Yes, indeed. Those new ideas were already starting to grow before computers created a more urgent need. Before programming languages, mathematicians such as Emil Post, Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, and Alan Turing already had many related ideas. In the 1940s these ideas began to spread, and the Macy Conference publications were the first to reach more of the technical public. In the same period, there were similar movements in psychology, as Sigmund Freud, Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen, and Jean Piaget also tried to imagine advanced architectures for "mental computation." In the same period, in neurology, there were my own early mentors—Nicholas Rashevsky, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, Norbert Wiener, and their followers—and all those new ideas began to coalesce under the name "cybernetics." Unfortunately, that new domain was mainly dominated by continuous mathematics and feedback theory. This made cybernetics slow to evolve more symbolic computational viewpoints, and the new field of Artificial Intelligence headed off to develop distinctly different kinds of psychological models.
JB: Gregory Bateson once said to me that the cybernetic idea was the most important idea since Jesus Christ.
MINSKY: Well, surely it was extremely important in an evolutionary way. cybernetics developed many ideas that were powerful enough to challenge the religious and vitalistic traditions that had for so long protected us from changing how we viewed ourselves. These changes were so radical as to undermine cybernetics itself. So much so that the next generation of computational pioneers—the ones who aimed more purposefully toward Artificial Intelligence—set much of cybernetics aside.
The practicality of the alternative—finding useful mechanistic interpretations of those mentalistic notions that have real value—is associated in its most elementary forms with what we call cybernetics, and in its advanced forms with what we call artificial intelligence.
To be sure, [early cybernetics] had had their own intellectual ancestors, but here for the first time we see a sufficiently concrete (i.e., technical) foundation for the use of mentalistic language as a constructive and powerful tool for describing machines. It is ironic that these ideas descend more from the "idealistic" rather than from the "mechanistic" lines in metaphysical and psychological thought! For the mechanistic tradition was fatally dominated by the tightly limited stock of kinematic images that were available, and did not lead to models capable of adequate information processing. The idealists were better equipped (and more boldly prepared) to consider more sophisticated abstract structures and interactions, though they had no mechanical floor upon which to set them.