Mastodawn

Hallå Kitteh Feb 24, 2017

> This morning I declined to write a popular article about the question "Can machines think?" I told the editor that I thought the question as ill-posed and uninteresting as the question "Can submarines swim?". But the editor, being a social scientist, was unmoved: he thought the latter a very interesting question too.

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD854.PDF

So that's where that's from! A friend had a variant of this quote somewhere, he may have put it up on his bedroom wall. It took me years to understand the analogy between the two questions and what the author even meant was a problem. Maybe I have partly the brain of a social scientist. :-)

Show thread

Hallå Kitteh Feb 24, 2017

I think the quote was written as "Asking whether machines can think is as uninteresting as asking whether submarines can swim. -- E.W. Dijkstra", and I was maybe 14 when i first saw it.

I went through several zen-like interpretations before I finally realized around the age of 18 that he probably simply meant "of course they don't think, stupid, that's not what thinking is and what machines do".

The original context, a rail against anthropomorphizing technology, seems to confirm my final interpretation.

Show thread

pettter ✅

@clacke I agree the question is similar, but I disagree that it is uninteresting. Or rather, the similarity is insofar as if _machines_ can swim, or if any conceivable machine could.

The Festo machines are on the cusp of blurring that distinction, and though I don't think any computing machine is even close to the blurry edge, I wouldn't disregard the possibility of a future machine running some kind of thinking software.

It seems to me that Dijkstra suffers from a lack of vision into what programs can do, does, and the possiblities they induce, not when considered in the abstract, but when coupled with real-world in- and output. The hard, complex problems all deal with unreliable, complex and ambiguous data of some sort, and moreover involve frequent human interaction. They help (and hinder) human interaction and productivity _entirely outside the computer_.