I've read this book a couple of times, with my most recent re-read being within the last year or two. So I guess that means that I, for one at least, find something of value in SofM even now.
So the question then might be "what do you find valuable in it?"
That would take a lot of words to answer fully, but let me start by saying that I agree with a lot of the other comments in on this post. The theory, inasmuch as you can call it that, isn't super concrete, isn't necessarily something you can implement directly as such, does mostly lack any kind of experimental evidence, and is kind of hand wavy. Sooooo... what value does it have?
Well for me it's mostly something I look at as inspirational from a very high-level, abstract point of view. It strikes me as more of a framework that could support very many theories, rather than a specific realizable theory. But I believe that there's something fundamentally correct (or at least useful) about the idea of a collections of semi-autonomous agents collaborating in a style akin to SofM. And on top of that, I think there are at least a handful of specific notions contained in the book that might be realizable and might prove useful. If you want a specific example, I'd say that I think something like K-lines may prove useful.
Of course I have no experimental evidence, or much of anything else beyond intuition, to support my beliefs in this. And I'm just one random guy who's pretty much a nobody in the AI field. I just sit quietly at my computer and work, not really trying to attract a lot of attention. And in the process of doing so, I do occasionally consult Society of Mind. YMMV.
And just to be clear in case anybody wants to misinterpret what I'm saying. It's not my "bible", and I'm not a Minsky acolyte, and I don't consider SofM to be the "be all end all" any more than I consider A New Kind of Science, Godel Escher, Bach, Hands on Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras & Tensorflow, Computational Approaches to Analogical Reasoning: Current Trends, or Parallel Distributed Processing, Vol. 1: Foundations to be the "be all, end all". I'm all about applying Bruce Lee's mantra:
"Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it."
So the question then might be "what do you find valuable in it?"
That would take a lot of words to answer fully, but let me start by saying that I agree with a lot of the other comments in on this post. The theory, inasmuch as you can call it that, isn't super concrete, isn't necessarily something you can implement directly as such, does mostly lack any kind of experimental evidence, and is kind of hand wavy. Sooooo... what value does it have?
Well for me it's mostly something I look at as inspirational from a very high-level, abstract point of view. It strikes me as more of a framework that could support very many theories, rather than a specific realizable theory. But I believe that there's something fundamentally correct (or at least useful) about the idea of a collections of semi-autonomous agents collaborating in a style akin to SofM. And on top of that, I think there are at least a handful of specific notions contained in the book that might be realizable and might prove useful. If you want a specific example, I'd say that I think something like K-lines may prove useful.
Of course I have no experimental evidence, or much of anything else beyond intuition, to support my beliefs in this. And I'm just one random guy who's pretty much a nobody in the AI field. I just sit quietly at my computer and work, not really trying to attract a lot of attention. And in the process of doing so, I do occasionally consult Society of Mind. YMMV.
And just to be clear in case anybody wants to misinterpret what I'm saying. It's not my "bible", and I'm not a Minsky acolyte, and I don't consider SofM to be the "be all end all" any more than I consider A New Kind of Science, Godel Escher, Bach, Hands on Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras & Tensorflow, Computational Approaches to Analogical Reasoning: Current Trends, or Parallel Distributed Processing, Vol. 1: Foundations to be the "be all, end all". I'm all about applying Bruce Lee's mantra:
"Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it."