“When we first meet those aliens in outer space, will we and they be able to converse?” This rhetorical sentence opens a provocative, although naturally inconclusive, short paper by the famous artificial intelligence pioneer. Minsky answers his own question in the affirmative, and justifies his optimism with two principles:
(1) Economics, which claims that every evolving intelligence needs to develop similar “symbol systems for representing things, causes, and goals”; and
(2) Sparseness, which asserts that a few “very special ideas” about such things as arithmetic, causal reasoning, and economics are so simple compared with any imaginable alternatives that they may be considered unique in the practical universe.
In addition to elaborating on the concepts of Economics and Sparseness, the author raises and then responds to (or side-steps) several possible objections to his position, and digresses into some brief but interesting discussions of causality and semantics. For a relatively light, nontechnical introduction to some deep philosophical issues in the fascinating context of exobiology, this paper is definitely recommended.
