- keynote - Keynotes - Day 1
Visionaries, Rebels and Machines: The Peculiar Case of Marv 'Meat Machine' Minsky
Wednesday 15th October 2025 • 5:00 PM - 5:30 PMIn 1969, in a squabble over ARPA’s research dollars, a man called Marvin Minsky, did a hatchet job on bottom-up AI. In a book he wrote with Seymour Papert called Perceptrons, Minsky proved that a perceptron, the name given to an early type of artificial neural network, could not learn how to carry out an exclusive or (XOR), a severe limitation for any computing system.
The problem was that it wasn’t true and, worse than that, Minsky and Papert knew it not to be true. This remarkable tale of skullduggery came just before AI's first big winter. But it foreshadowed all that was to come next, including the rise of generative AI, which could only really happen when Hinton invented back propagation of errors.
About Jamie Dobson
Jamie Dobson is the co-founder of Container Solutions. A first encounter with a BBC computer and BASIC at the age of nine launched his lifelong passion for programming and software development. In 2000, Jamie graduated from the University of Hull with a degree in Computer Science and in 2003 obtained a master’s degree from the University of Edinburgh where he learned to program the supercomputers that foreshadowed the world to come. Widely recognised as a leader specialising in building high performance teams and companies, Jamie nowadays helps executive teams to succeed with the cloud. When not messing about with computers and the people who program them, Jamie lives in Greenwich, London, where he works in peace.