He named Douglas Lenat as one of the ten or so people working on common sense (at the time of the interview in 1998), and said the best system based on common sense is CYC. But he called for proprietary systems not to keep the data a secret, and to distribute copies, so they can evolve and get new ideas, and because we must understand how they work.
Sabbatini: Why there are no computers already working with common sense knowledge ?
Minsky: There are very few people working with common sense problems in Artificial Intelligence. I know of no more than five people, so probably there are about ten of them out there. Who are these people ? There’s John McCarthy, at Stanford University, who was the first to formalize common sense using logics. He has a very interesting web page. Then, there is Harry Sloaman, from the University of Edinburgh, who’s probably the best philosopher in the world working on Artificial Intelligence, with the exception of Daniel Dennett, but he knows more about computers. Then there’s me, of course. Another person working on a strong common-sense project is Douglas Lenat, who directs the CYC project in Austin. Finally, Douglas Hofstadter, who wrote many books about the mind, artificial intelligence, etc., is working on similar problems.
We talk only to each other and no one else is interested. There is something wrong with computer sciences.
Sabbatini: Is there any AI software that uses the common sense approach ?
Minsky: As I said, the best system based on common sense is CYC, developed by Doug Lenat, a brilliant guy, but he set up a company, CYCorp, and is developing it as a proprietary system. Many computer scientists have a good idea and then made it a secret and start making proprietary systems. They should distribute copies of their system to graduate systems, so that they could evolve and get new ideas. We must understand how they work.
[1] http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n07/opiniao/minsky/minsky_i.h...
An free updated version of his book "The Computer Revolution in Philosophy: Philosophy Science and Models of Mind" is available [2].
About the cool retro cover he writes: "I was not consulted about the cover. The book is mainly concerned with the biological, psychological and philosophical significance of virtual machinery. I did not know that the publishers had decided to associate it with paper tape devices until it was published." -Aaron Sloman
A recent update (Feb 2016) references Minsky's "Future of AI Technology" paper on "causal diversity" as being relevant to the the "Probabilistic (associative) vs structural learning" section. [3]
Wikipedia:
Aaron Sloman is a philosopher and researcher on artificial intelligence and cognitive science who was born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He is the author of several papers on philosophy, epistemology and artificial intelligence. He held the Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, and before that a chair with the same title at the University of Sussex. He has collaborated with biologist Jackie Chappell on the evolution of intelligence. Since retiring he is Honorary Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at Birmingham.
Influences
His philosophical ideas were deeply influenced by the writings of Immanuel Kant, Gottlob Frege and Karl Popper, and to a lesser extent by John Austin, Gilbert Ryle, R. M. Hare (who, as his 'personal tutor' at Balliol College discussed meta-ethics with him), Imre Lakatos and Ludwig Wittgenstein. What he could learn from philosophers left large gaps, which he decided around 1970 research in artificial intelligence might fill. E.g. philosophy of mind could be transformed by testing ideas in working fragments of minds, and philosophy of mathematics could be illuminated by trying to understand how a working robot could develop into a mathematician.
Much of his thinking about AI was influenced by Marvin Minsky and despite his critique of logicism he also learnt much from John McCarthy. His work on emotions can be seen as an elaboration of a paper on "Emotional and motivational controls of cognition", written in the 1960s by Herbert A. Simon. He disagrees with all of these on some topics, while agreeing on others.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Sloman
[2] http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/crp/
[3] http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/CausalDiversity.html