The Society of Mind
Minsky described mind as a society of agents, none of them intelligent, with thinking arising from their interaction.
Why it matters
The field's leading symbolist concluded that there is no single mechanism of mind, which brought him close to his opponents.
The book is two hundred and seventy self-contained pages, one idea each. Minsky argues that no agent understands the whole and that conflict between agents is what thinking is. It offers no formal model, and was criticised for exactly that. But the claim that there is no centre echoes both connectionism and Brooks's subsumption architecture of the same year.