The Society of Mind (1986) [pdf]
I was a grad student in AI at the time this book came out so I can tell you a little bit about the historical context from my personal perspective with benefit of hindsight.  The field at the time was dominated by two schools of thought, called the &quot;neats&quot; and the &quot;scruffies&quot;.  At the risk of significant oversimplification, the neats thought that the right way to do AI was using formal logic while the scruffies took an empirical approach: noodle around with code and see what works.  Both approaches led to interesting results.  The neat legacy is modern-day theorem provers while the scruffy legacy is chatbots, self-driving cars, and neural nets.<p>SoM didn&#x27;t fit neatly (no pun intended) into either camp.  It wasn&#x27;t empirical and it wasn&#x27;t formal.  It was just a collection of random loosely-associated ideas and nothing ever came of it.  It was too informal to lead to interesting theoretical results, and it was too vague to be implemented and so no one could test it experimentally.  And both of those things are still true today.  I think it&#x27;s fair to say that if the author had been anyone but Minsky no one would have paid any attention to it at all.