The final day of MCPC 2007 started early, but it wasn’t until after lunch that Professor Marvin Minsky gave what I thought was the most interesting keynote speech of the conference, entitled “The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of the Human Mind.”

Minsky is one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, having written extensively on both the science and philosophy of AI. To be honest I’m not sure his keynote had much to do with the theme of the conference, but there were still some choice quotes including

“We have robots to make things, but no robots to fix things”

“There’s no point sending humans to the moon before you’ve sent robots to build a hotel”

“If you understand something in only one way, you don’t really understand it at all”

“Common sense things that robots don’t know: you can use string to pull but not to push; things fall over if not supported; it’s hard to stay awake if you’re bored”

The stand-out session for me was by Bug Lab’s founder Peter Semmelhack. Although I’ve been aware of Bug Labs for a while I’ve not been completely clear about what they’re doing, but Semmelhack described how their open source approach to hardware aims to tap into the long tail of tomorrow’s consumer electronics market. Think of it like a Lego Mindstorms but for ‘real’ products - products which only a hundred or a thousand people might want to buy, rather than the tens or hundreds of thousands typically required for a profitable consumer electronics device. I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to work a Bug Labs product into my PhD, but it’s definitely something I want to play around with at some point.

And so that was the end of the conference. It’s been an excellent in-at-the-deep-end experience for me, really interesting, and encouraging also in terms of the enthusiasm people have shown for my own ideas. Tomorrow I’m flying back to the UK, but not before checking out Mr Bartley’s…