As a teen in the '90s, I dismissed Marvin Minsky’s 1986 classic, The Society of Mind, as outdated. But decades later, as monolithic large language models reach their limits, Minsky’s vision—intelligence emerging from modular "agents"—seems strikingly prescient. Today’s Mixture-of-Experts models, multi-agent architectures, and internal oversight mechanisms are effectively operationalizing his insights, reshaping how we think about building robust, scalable, and aligned AI systems.

Finally someone mentions this. Maybe I've been in the wrong circles, but I've been wishing I had the time to implement a society-of-mind-inspired system ever since llamacpp got started, and I never saw anyone else reference it until now.

Having studied sociology and psychology in my previous life I am now surprised how relevant some of the almost forgotten ideas became to my current life as a dev!

MIT OpenCourseWare course including video lectures taught by Minsky himself:

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-868j-the-society-of-mind-fall-...

> Eventually, I dismissed Minsky’s theory as an interesting relic of AI history, far removed from the sleek deep learning models and monolithic AI systems rising to prominence.

That was my read of it when I checked it out a few years ago, obsessed with explicit rules based lisp expert systems and "good old fashioned AI" ideas that never made much sense, were nothing like how our minds work, and were obvious dead ends that did little of anything actually useful (imo). All that stuff made the AI field a running joke for decades.

This feels a little like falsely attributing new ideas that work to old work that was pretty different? Is there something specific from Minsky that would change my mind about this?

I recall reading there were some early papers that suggested some neural network ideas more similar to the modern approach (iirc), but the hardware just didn't exist at the time for them to be tried. That stuff was pretty different from the mainstream ideas at the time though and distinct from Minsky's work (I thought).

Good timing, I just started rereading my copy last week to get my vibe back.

Not only is it great for tech nerds such as ourselves for tech, but its a great philosophy on thinking about and living life. Such a phenomenal read, easy, simple, wonderful format, wish more tech-focused books were written in this style.