Marvin Minski On 50 Years Of AI

What surprises me is how few people have been working on higher-level theories of how thinking works. That's been a big disappointment. I'm just publishing a big new book on what we should be thinking about: How does a three- or four-year-old do the common-sense reasoning that they're so good at and that no machine seems to be able to do? The main difference being that if you are having trouble understanding something, you usually think, "What's wrong with me?" or "What's wasting my time?" or "Why isn't this way of thinking working? Is there some other way of thinking that might be better?"
But the kinds of AI projects that have been happening for the last 30 or 40 years have had almost no reflective thinking at all. It's all reacting to a situation and collecting statistics. We organized a conference about common-sense thinking about three years ago and we were only able to find about a dozen researchers in the whole world who were interested in that.

Interview in Technology Review.