''The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind'' is a 2006 book by cognitive scientist

Marvin Minsky Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, ...

that elaborates and expands on Minsky's ideas as presented in his earlier book ''

Society of Mind ''The Society of Mind'' is both the title of a 1986 book and the name of a theory of natural intelligence as written and developed by Marvin Minsky. In his book of the same name, Minsky constructs a model of human intelligence step by step, bui ...

''. Minsky argues that emotions are different ways to think that our mind uses to increase our intelligence. He challenges the distinction between emotions and other kinds of thinking. His main argument is that emotions are "ways to think" for different "problem types" that exist in the world, and that the brain has rule-based mechanisms (selectors) that turn on emotions to deal with various problems. The book reviews the accomplishments of AI, why modelling an AI is difficult in terms of replicating the behaviors of humans, if and how AIs think, and in what manner they might experience struggles and pleasures.

Reviews

In a review for ''

The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...

'',

neurologist Neurology (from el, νεῦρον (neûron), "string, nerve" and the suffix -logia, "study of") is the branch of medicine dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of all categories of conditions and disease involving the brain, the spinal c ...

Richard Restak states that:

Outline

Minsky outlines the book as follows: # "''We are born with many mental resources.''" # "''We learn from interacting with others.''" # "''Emotions are different Ways to Think.''" # "''We learn to think about our recent thoughts.''" # "''We learn to think on multiple levels.''" # "''We accumulate huge stores of commonsense knowledge.''" # "''We switch among different Ways to Think.''" # "''We find multiple ways to represent things.''" # "''We build multiple models of ourselves.''"

Other reviews

Science and Evolution - Books and Reviews

Technology Review

Author's pre-publication draft

References

External links

Marvin Minsky
at MIT * 2006 non-fiction books Books about cognition Artificial neural networks Artificial intelligence publications {{psych-book-stub