Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A.I. to Google, Facebook, and the World

by Cade Metz

GARY Marcus came from a long line of thinkers who believe in the importance of nature, not just nurture. They’re called nativists, and they argue that a significant portion of all human knowledge is wired into the brain, not learned from experience. This is an argument that has spanned centuries of philosophy and psychology, running from Plato to Immanuel Kant to Noam Chomsky to Steven Pinker. The nativists stand in opposition to the empiricists, who believe that human knowledge comes mostly from learning. Gary Marcus studied under Pinker, the psychologist, linguist, and popular science author, before building his own career around the same fundamental attitude. Now he was wielding his nativism in the world of artificial intelligence. He was the world’s leading critic of neural networks, a Marvin Minsky for the age of deep learning.