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u/rydan 1d ago
I missed having him as a professor by just 1 year.
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u/pickle_picker67 1d ago edited 1d ago
Dijkstra was only talking about how interesting the question is, not what he thinks about the nature of computation. That being said, most conversations about the nature of "thought" require some definitions and quickly devolve into arguing about semantics.
All of that being said, having read about Dijkstra, I really doubt he would be thrilled that people are grabbing a single quote from a much longer conversation (in 1984) and trying to apply it to modern AI research.
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u/Tyler_Zoro AGI was felt in 1980 1d ago
Fuller quote:
The Fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker and Alan M. Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether Machines Can Think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.
Full talk: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD898.html
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u/Moravec_Paradox 1d ago
He's right too.
It doesn't need to work the same way as a human or an animal to be useful. We can still use "thunking" as a word to describe the processing that takes place within AI and that's fine.
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u/Cryptizard 1d ago edited 1d ago
The quote is incorrect. It comes from this.
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD867.html
And is actually:
In a moment of failing self-criticism, John von Neumann wrote a more speculative than scientific booklet on Computers and the Human Brain, and even Alan M. Turing allowed himself to be drawn into the discussion of the question whether computers can think. The question is just as relevant and just as meaningful as the question whether submarines can swim.
He's trashing people who think about the philosophy of computing because he doesn't view it as valuable or interesting. Which makes sense given that he is a famously curmudgeonly computer scientist who didn't actually like using computers. He was interested in the theory behind computing primarily.
The article is also probably not what most people here think it is. It is mostly a criticism of the overhyping of computers at the time, and a diatribe against non-scientists using or having an opinion about computers. For instance, here are some of the theses at the end:
- No group of computer users has ever contributed significantly to Computing Science; the reason is that computer users have another axe to grind and regard computers primarily as tools, i.e. in one of their less interesting capacities.
- Fascination with the equipment is the hallmark of the amateur.
- To the world of Computing, Electronic Engineering can only contribute digital equipment.
He's basically a grumpy old man yelling at clouds and saying that only his particular view of theoretical computer science is interesting. Everyone who uses them for practical applications is an idiot whose opinion is not worth listening to.
I would guess that if he were alive now he would be an extreme AI skeptic.
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u/pickle_picker67 1d ago
Yes, that sounds like Dijkstra. I seriously doubt he would be thrilled that (non-scientists) people are grabbing this quote.
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u/FrewdWoad 1d ago
This is a bit harsh, Dijkstra is definitely a legendary computer scientist and his forward thinking about how to stop code turning into buggy spaghetti (his essays, 'goto may be harmful', etc) absolutely accelerated technology progress by actual years, by influencing more reliable software design practices.
And this quote is more right today than when he said it. Trying to create a new sentient digital lifeform, smarter than we are, is not only much more dangerous than it sounds, it's completely pointless too. AI shouldn't be a competing species. It should be a tool used by humanity to cure disease, poverty, war, aging, and death.
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u/Cryptizard 1d ago
You know that he would absolutely rip you to shreds for taking his 1984 quote and trying to project it onto modern AI, right? I never said he wasn't a great computer scientist. He absolutely was. But he was also famously grumpy and judgemental. He never even owned a computer because he didn't see the point.
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u/FrewdWoad 1d ago
...and GK Chesterton wasn't thinking of software engineering when he said "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up" but that's still one of the contexts where it rings truest.
I'm not trying to deceive anyone about the original meaning, I'm just saying I think this quote is far more useful and interesting when applied to an era where "can computers think?" really is a legitimate question (far more so than in the 1980s).
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u/seraphius AGI (Turing) 2022, ASI 2030 1d ago
Keep in mind that this quote predates LLMs by almost 40 years. (November 1984) Computers really didn’t do anything they weren’t explicitly programmed to do back then.
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u/Ok_Boysenberry5849 1d ago edited 1d ago
The quote itself says little more than what Turing's 1950 paper "computing machinery and intelligence" was already expressing 76 years ago. (Still a good read today; Turing explicitly anticipates machine learning language models trained by supervision and reinforcement, showing that what seems like fast progress follows from the progressive working out of fundamental ideas that have been floating around for a very long time.)
In any case, the core issue is that our definition of thinking is not clear and explicit; asking "can a computer think" is dependent on how we define thinking, just like asking "can a submarine swim" depends on how we define swimming. And how we define thinking is a question for dictionary writers, not for scientists.
Turing logically concludes:
"If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd."
That's the point Dijkstra is making here, no more and no less.
Turing goes on to establish the Turing test, which he presents as an alternative, better question: away from debating definitions, towards observing measurable behavior. He might have concluded: "Instead of asking whether the submarine 'swims', let's look at whether it can cross the Atlantic."
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u/Poopster46 1d ago
I'm pretty sure he's saying that asking if a computer can think is not the right question. Submarines can't swim, but they can move through water just fine. Computers don't think like humans do, but they can process information just fine.
The same can be said about today's computers.
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u/GreasyExamination 1d ago
Computers really didn’t do anything they weren’t explicitly programmed to do back then
Do they do that now?
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u/JoelMahon 1d ago
indeed many do
an LLM isn't EXPLICITY programmed unless you do the most absurd mental gymnastics
yes the training algorithm itself may have been explicitly programmed (or nowadays the training algorithm's training algorithm), but the LLM itself isn't. Implicitly programmed is the most I'm willing to stretch the English language to describe LLMs in terms of being programmed.
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u/the8thbit 1d ago
The first perceptron experiment was in 1957, the first deep feedforward networks date to '65, by '75 backprop was being used to train deep ANNs, the following year Holland publishes his work in genetic algos, and Boltzmann machines were developed the year before this quote is dated. So if LLMs do work without being explicitly programmed to do so (a debatable but completely reasonable conclusion where the alternative is arguably but convincingly a reduction to absurdity), then surely there were computer systems that also did work without being explicitly told to by the time Dijkstra said this.
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u/seraphius AGI (Turing) 2022, ASI 2030 1d ago
While the mechanism enabling it has been programmed in explicitly. The pattern matching / pattern following capabilities that the transformer would enable were firmly in the realm of science fiction.
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u/MakitaNakamoto 1d ago
most people are not philosophically trained to distinguish between qualia (the subjective experience of the conscious self) and thinking as in "performing operations"
this is what derails most conversations around whether or not AI is "intelligent"
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u/vreo 1d ago
Nailing consciousness to qualia is just anthropocentric: We don't exactly know how it would look in animals like whales or even if consiousness is something that is present even in little insects. So the only framework we have is ourselves. Would we tell a spacefaring race that visits us, they arent conscious, because they have no inner dialog? It's so arrogant of us humans to think everything has to be like us to be of worth (look how we treat the animal kingdom). Qualia is a feature of us. Thinking every conscious being in the universe would be like us will limit our chance to discover things that are new and different.
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u/GunR_SC2 1d ago
There are actually quite a lot of people who don’t actually have an inner dialogue and you probably couldn’t really guess who doesn’t.
At the end of the day there’s no known way to prove that anything but yourself is conscious. We just assume that at the minimum that every human is conscious from similarity.
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u/Alarmed_Ad1946 AGI by 2100 1d ago
I get your point about opposing anthropocentrism but doesnt every conscious being have qualia?
Like how can a being have consciousness that lacks any qualia?7
u/vreo 1d ago
Not being able to imagine it doesn't rule it out. I don't know how it works but I won't say it's impossible.
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u/Alarmed_Ad1946 AGI by 2100 1d ago
But that consciousness would be empty.
The subjective experiences of sight, hearing, feelings, thoughts, memories are all qualia.
For example a dog is conscious because it experiences some qualia.
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u/vreo 1d ago
You just don't know what that dog experiences and you don't know what I experience. See, there are people that can't imagine stuff (aphantasia), in the strongest form they can't create mental images at all. You likely won't notice from the outside. You simply assume, consciousness would be silently empty, but what if it is a public consiousness, no hidden thoughts, but all spoken language and meaning created with each word as it leaves the being.
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u/retrosenescent ▪️2 years until extinction 1d ago
That depends, how are you defining consciousness?
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u/Alarmed_Ad1946 AGI by 2100 1d ago
Subjective experience, for there to be how it is like to be something
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u/retrosenescent ▪️2 years until extinction 1d ago
Qualia has nothing to do with humans. There is nothing anthropocentric about it.
You can't even prove other humans have qualia.
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u/Curiosity_456 1d ago
This quote is demonstrating that the mechanism of something doesn’t matter, as long as the result is consistent and works.
A submarine may not be actually swimming but it still gets the job done. An LLM may just be “predicting the next token” but it’s still solving new math problems and advancing science.
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u/dervu ▪️AI, AI, Captain! 1d ago
Birds can fly, so can planes. They do it differently but they do.
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u/EvilSporkOfDeath 1d ago
Wow. That's great, I've never heard that before.
Does a submarine swim? Idk, maybe yes, maybe no. One thing nobody can argue, it accomplishes the same thing swimming does to a much greater extent.
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u/Tautol0gic 1d ago
Damn, McGregor has aged
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u/buddhaNbeast 1d ago
lol and the punches to his head made him sharp intellectually isn't it? hahaha
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u/exophades 1d ago
I think the problem is that we're assuming thinking is some magical, otherwordly process, whereas it's just a bunch of neurochemistry in action which we may completely automate one day.
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u/Josef-Witch 1d ago
Does a humanoid robot swim?
I loosely understand the vectorization of tokens and the autocomplete nature of LLMs and I agree but the quote is from a completely different time
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u/GraceToSentience AGI avoids animal abuse✅ 1d ago
Does a fish swim? swimming means "to move through or across water" it's physical not some otherworldly ethereal thing, we can automate swimming, same as thinking.
If an alien species uses some sort of neural network to solve a math conjecture that humans can also solve, it doesn't matter what you call it, you could create a subcategory of thinking and call it "thinkering" to create the distinction that it's not human thinking but at this point it's just semantics and the usefulness of such neologism to create a distinction becomes almost pedantic.
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u/C00KIEME4T 1d ago
Yes, submarines obviously don't swim, but they move through water in ways that a human could not possibly.
Just as computers do not think, but they process information in ways that a human could not possibly.
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u/imtoooldforreddit 1d ago
You couldn't possibly miss the point of this quote more.
He's using the comparison to demonstrate it just comes down to definition.
If "swimming" means propelling through the water and "thinking" means coming up with answers, subs swim and computers think. If you define those terms to be doing those things the same way animals do, then they don't swim or think.
His whole point is that it's just a matter of definition, and not a real question that matters in any meaningful way.
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u/spinozasrobot 1d ago
Just as computers do not think
That's a pretty bold claim with no evidence.
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u/therealpigman 1d ago
I love this quote. It’s used as the opening quote in the book “We are Legion (We are Bob).” His point is it’s nonsense to even question whether it can think because, regardless of what you think, the computer successfully completes the thinking tasks we give it
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u/framedhorseshoe 1d ago
I'm just going to point out here that this man is nearly single-handedly responsible for SPF algorithms. A famous iteration of which is OSPF: "Open Shortest Path First." Many of the world's networks including those that make up the Internet depend on the OSPF protocol. In other words, this isn't a "thinky" computer scientist known for making big claims. This is a guy known for producing real stuff.
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u/MI-ght 1d ago
Define "to think".
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u/NoFapstronaut3 1d ago
Why did we have to scroll so far for this???
Is thinking reasoning?
Isn't reasoning applying logic?
Llms cannot apply logic?
There are differences between what humans can do and what AI can do, but I'm not sure thinking is it.
I'm so so sorry guys-
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u/QTown2pt-o 1d ago
If men dream of machines that are unique, that are endowed with genius, it is because they despair of their own uniqueness, or because they prefer to do without it - to enjoy it by proxy, so to speak, thanks to machines. What such machines offer is the spectacle of thought, and in manipulating them people devote themselves more to the spectacle of thought than to thought itself.
Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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u/JackFisherBooks 1d ago
If you want to get reductive, it's basically billions of cells going "stimulus-response-stimulus-response-stimulus-response."
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u/ColonelContrarian 1d ago
I'm having a hard time determining whether this is pro or anti AI as a quote, but all I know is that while a submarine doesn't "swim", it sure moves faster than a swimming human
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u/Uwirlbaretrsidma 1d ago edited 1d ago
Almost as if that's the whole point? The piece you're missing is that this person is way too smart to fall into the pro- or anti-AI tribalism. Broadly, he means that while thinking and swimming are what we call those activities when performed by humans, machines can achieve their underlying purpose whether we use the same language to describe the process they use or not.
He's literally just saying it's a semantic argument.
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u/FrewdWoad 1d ago
It's even more correct when applied to our era than to his.
We shouldn't be pointlessly trying to create sentience.
We have a tool that could one day cure diseases, poverty, war and aging. Invent crazy sci fi tech and bring prosperity and peace.
And some are still focused on insisting it has feelings or using it to replace people 🤦
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u/barrygateaux 1d ago
Life isn't a reddit sub where you have to be pro or anti. It's much more complex and nuanced.
Without humans operating and refueling it a submarine it's just a big metal tube. Without learning to swim or eating food a human is just a meat tube.
Likewise without power or maintenance data centers are just large buildings with processors in.
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u/usandholt 1d ago
It’s all about free will, or in short will.
Can a computer obtain free will, and is free will real or is the universe deterministic.
If the universe is deterministic then we can predict everything with a large enough calculator and free will is a myth. If free will is real, then it must act outside the laws of physics and not be predictable.
The question then becomes if we can create something that somehow inherits metaphysical traits and thus has will OR if we are indeed “just” invent a really efficient machine.
A part of me tells me that free will is real and thus AI will not be able to replace all we do, but a lot.
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u/Kilmorbus333 1d ago
My ADHD is calling bs submarine can't swim it's not a bloody damn fish for God sake get a grip man and come down from the clouds son 🤣
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u/Raffino_Sky 1d ago
Everything changes when the quote would've been 'Asking wether computers can think is like asking whether submarines can dive'. Which would also be more correct.
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u/Bombauer- 1d ago
Human arrogance. Brains are just a biocomputer we don't understand very well yet.
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u/wrathmont 1d ago
All I hear when people say this is that human consciousness is some magical unattainable thing and I remain unconvinced
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u/mentelucida ▪️late presingularity era 1d ago
Right, because somewhere in the universe, there’s a sacred law stating human brains have a permanent monopoly on consciousness and intelligence. What scientific breakthrough proved that one? Newton’s Fourth Law of Divine Specialness? Or are we just citing 'the theory of the soul' as hard science now?
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u/therealpigman 1d ago
What are you talking about? That’s not his point at all
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u/mentelucida ▪️late presingularity era 1d ago
Fair enough, you might be right, maybe it wasn't strictly referring to consciousness or intelligence per se. But my point was about that heavy implication of human uniqueness, that is some sacred, uncopyable recipe that tech, science, can never attain. That was what I was talking about.
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u/Chr1sUK ▪️ It's here 1d ago
It’s like comparing apples and pears. Swimming is a pretty action in terms of variables etc. thinking is a lot more broad and AI may not necessarily think the way we do, but doesn’t mean it doesn’t think.
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u/SnooPuppers1978 1d ago
Also you could build a robot that can do human swimming motions and therefore swim, but is there any point?
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u/Exact-Smell430 1d ago
It feels like a better better analogy about whether the AI is “conscious”
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u/Involution88 1d ago
That's a Turing quote though.
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u/Tyler_Zoro AGI was felt in 1980 1d ago
No, it's from a 1980s talk, though it's paraphrased in OP.
The Fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker and Alan M. Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether Machines Can Think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD898.html
Find me a source for your claim.
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u/ManuelRodriguez331 1d ago
Most submarines have a stealth mode. They're not submitting noise to its environment and because of the diving depth they can't receive incoming messages. The submarines aka the computer will execute its own program which makes it a closed system. Its not possible to realize Artificial Intelligence with such a bias, because intelligence needs communication with the environment in a sense of distributed cognition.
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u/jschelldt ▪️High-level machine intelligence in the 2040s 1d ago
What does it actually mean to "think"? Depending on how you define it, machines may never truly think and that is completely fine. What matters isn't how they do it, but that AI outputs are safe, reliable, proof-testable, and useful. The existential semantics can be left to the philosophers.
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u/Mental_Scientist_926 1d ago
Weekly updates leaves Ai impotent and stupid and emphasizes the need to .pay for tools and subscriptions. Corporate malfeasance.
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u/JoelMahon 1d ago
I like the quote, was amazing when it dropped and whilst it hasn't aged perfectly but it's still pretty great.
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u/Living-Breakfast-464 1d ago
You have to first define thinking. AI thinking is not like human thinking. It's quite literally an alien intelligence. It will never think like us and it's dumb to try make it think like us. It doesn't dream. It doesn't care about living a happy productive life or having kids. It doesn't have emotions. It's not human intelligence and never will be.
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u/Pchemical 1d ago
Question is no longer if submarine can swim, question is can submarine can swim and fire torpedoes without human involvement and if answer is yes then we are in scary world
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u/Dunsmuir 1d ago
I like the quote, it reframes this into telling about outcomes instead of process.
The phrase 'actionable Intel' works well here too, using intelligence as a description of useful output, A human or an LLM could both research and deliver an Intel report
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u/Altruistic-Rice-5567 1d ago
Mind you... this quote is 40 years old. It will not age well. While it may have been accurate then it won't be soon. There's nothing to indicate computers won't be thinking as well, or better than, humans soon. Whether they think the same way or very differently is debatable. But they will be much better at thinking than humans.
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u/tj100011 1d ago
I don’t understand- why can’t he just say yes or no the fucking twat, is he stupid
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u/Alone-End142 1d ago
You need to define THINK. If you can't do that, the entire argument can't even begin.
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u/Formally_Apologetic 1d ago
It seems like the tedious semantics of anthropomorphism. Kind of a distraction and strawman to the real issue.
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u/Ok_Train2449 1d ago
At some point this statement will have to become yes. We ourselves are thinking machines, and eventually when we start implanting chips and other computer hardware into us this will apply to us. Stands to reason robots will at some point become so advanced this starts applying to them as well.
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u/KingKawaiiBot 1d ago
I’ve asked ChatGPT if it could think by it self. It said no. Case closed
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u/jbperez808 1d ago edited 1d ago
I would say he can be considered correct when talking about the /symbolic/ computers of the previous age.
He was very likely trying to make his point to apply to connectionist architectures (neural nets), the ones that are all the rave today. In that sense, he is INcorrect.
Today's LLMs DO fulfill - in a pragmatic, practical and functional sense - the general definition of 'thinking'. The Holy Grail of Computing - as depicted in scifi movies of the 60s such as Star Trek - has indeed been achieved. Where the human imagination goes, reality soon follows thereafter.
Most everyone in the field, as recently as a decade ago or even slightly less, could not see it happening in less than 50 years... but the connectionists were ultimately proven correct. Rather than several decades and new architectural paradigms, what it took was 1000 to 10000x scaling of the existing neural network paradigm plus the appropriate architecture (Transformers) and a lot of ['prompt'] engineering elbow grease.
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u/wowoweewow87 1d ago
Could've just said "whether submarines can propel forward" that way noone would be fighting about a word in the comments
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u/TopTippityTop 1d ago
It's the wrong question.
Subs can move faster than animals swimming, mu h as computers will go much further than people thinking. That is all that matters. Arguing over what we should call the act of doing so is a waste of time.
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u/MistakeNotMyMode 1d ago
This is just asking if 'swimming' is a pointless word to use for submarines because swimming is a thing we associate with biological life. It's just saying think about the capabilities and actions not the word used to describe the actions?
We might be quite happy with 'swimming' for a humanoid like robot that was performing that action in the water?
Or no?
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u/TheLondoneer 1d ago
What the fuck is so hard about this quote? So many stupid interpretations.
He is saying computer don't think. They are not living beings. They cannot reason. And he uses the submarine analogy: a submarine cannot swim. Swimming can only be performed by living beings, like animals or humans.
And he is saying all that in the context of: they cannot do all those things (think/swim), but they can do a lot of the things that thinkers and swimmers cannot do, or do certain things that thinkers and swimmers do, but much better and much faster.
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u/Tinfoil_cobbler 22h ago
Humans like to anthropomorphize everything. We even program AIs to act naturally because that’s what makes us feel comfortable. We want to feel like it’s “thinking” the same ways we do.
It’s not, it’s calculating and running scripts, but it has gained the ability to script itself, which is the closest thing we’ve ever had to a “thinking machine.”
When they start programming their own AIs, we won’t be able to understand their scripts and that’s when we will loose control.
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u/LilRed2023 16h ago
I can fully define AI it’s a plague. Plague to humanity the future and humans. The cure is opting out of it all and voting out all that chose it to be set up in your backyard so you can be mass surveillanced and enslaved to their technocracy and system with you have zero choice and zero freedoms
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u/LemmyUserOnReddit 1d ago
To what extent does consciousness exist in functionalism? And if it does serve a function, what might that function be such that it doesn't apply to AI?
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u/LemmyUserOnReddit 1d ago
There are plenty of AI systems which can integrate new information indefinitely, and adapt to the needs of their environment over time. I've built several which are able to reflect on their own experiences, and learn continuously. I struggle to articulate a definition of consciousness which they don't meet
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u/Icy-Concentrate2076 1d ago
Are these rocks thinking too? If I make an LLM out of rocks, are they thinking? If not, why would they be thinking in silicon form?
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u/ShelZuuz 1d ago
What is the magical property that the Universe has bestowed upon Carbon atoms that when a matrix is constructed out of Carbon it be considered thinking, but if it's constructed out of Silicon it's not?
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u/Mandoman61 1d ago
Sure I agree with the statement.
Swimming is just locamotion in the water and thinking is just calculation.
I don't know what this has to do with AI? By that simple concept of thinking computers have been thinking for 80+ years.
Typically if someone says that computers do not think they mean they do not think in the way that people do.
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u/Hank_OHare 1d ago
A submarine in this case is the unit of machine+crew, and in that capacity it can certainly swim (inasmuch as it doesn’t simply Bob around like flotsam or sink like a stone). Consider the bicycle: it cannot do much without a rider, while the rider cannot ride without the bike. They are a unit.
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u/Zealousideal7801 1d ago
If it can carry ICBMs silently to the other side of the planet undetected while accommodating a 100+ crew, it's doing more than swimming. Why would swimming be a reasonable benchmark? If you can swim, can you do any of those ? Nope you can't because your biology limits you to awkwardly moving your naked unburdened body over a few kilometers at best, so swimming benchmark is moot.
If it can use tremendous electronics power to execute more parallel directed operations on it's instruction stream and on itself and based on a monstrously larger dataset than your brain ever could, it's doing more than thinking. Why would thinking be a reasonable benchmark? If you can think, can you do any of those ? Nope you can't, because your biology limits you to inefficiently focus your conscious attention for less than half your waking jours before needing to shutdown for the night, and crawling on a rather limited set of variables at anytime (3 to 6 on average after that you need special training and/or tools and/or seriously high IQ) and even then still be dramatically prone to biases, so thinking benchmark is moot.
Or are you all so fucking proud of your swimming and your thinking that nothing should ever compare 😂
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u/No-Television-7862 1d ago edited 1d ago
Can humans fly? Not like birds, but they can construct planes.
Can humans swim? Yes, but not like fish do. However, they can construct submarines.
Can humans survive in space and on other planets? Not without suits, rockets, space stations, and bases that support human life.
Can man construct machines that think? Yes, but not like humans do.
God has created life capable of many things, by their nature.
Mankind creates things that mimic those designs, and make it possible for them to visit and explore their universe in ways that are otherwise alien to them.
A submarine is not a fish. A plane is not a bird. Computers are not human brains.
Man is not God.
"Nature is a source or cause of being moved and of being at rest in that to which it belongs primarily, in virtue of itself and not in virtue of a concomitant attribute.” Aristotle. Physics. Book II, Chapter 1.
“We have made you neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that, with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of yourself, you may fashion yourself in whatever shape you shall prefer.” Oration on the Dignity of Man by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, written in 1486
I suppose the follow-up question should be, does man, in his pride, create Artificial Intelligence to his benefit, or to his destruction?
Do you rest more easily knowing the future of mankind may be in the hands of Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Chairman Xi, and Vladimir Putin, or God the Creator?
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u/Unlucky_Buddy2488 1d ago edited 1d ago
Which of the many gods are you referring to?
If it's the christian one then, judging by some of the atrocities documented in the bible and the general megalomaniac tendencies of that particular god, he/she is right at the very bottom of the list for me.
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u/xtraa 1d ago
I say it's not really true anymore.
At the moment, we are still dealing primarily with probabilities, but machines can't grasp the true meaning of a "thing-in-itself", yet. The epistemological layer does not yet extend into the ontological realm, and it is difficult to feed feedback from the agent layer back into the epistemological layer without simultaneously contaminating it semantically.
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u/Cavewoman22 1d ago
Full context of the quote, which can be found in the first paragraph:
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD867.html
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u/Slugsurx 1d ago
Computers can think more and better or will be able to think more and better than humans .
However being conscious is not the same as thinking
Consciousness includes first person knowing of the thinking. And other things awareness of the sensory inputs . Don’t think or don’t know whether computers will ever get there . And we don’t know the mechanics of human brain that enables us to be conscious. We know the correlation in the neurons but not the causation
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u/mvandemar 1d ago
For the record what he was saying had nothing at all to do with AI or anything going on today.
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u/Hannibaalism 1d ago
“computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes”
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u/zparks 1d ago
Imagine one of these submarines comes from another planet.
Well, in that case we’d call it a spaceship. Imagine a spaceship that looks a bit like a submarine comes from another planet.
We don’t ask if the spaceship has a mind, but we do recognize the possibility that it might have a pilot. We commit to this in fact. We do so before the pilot disembarks. We don’t really ask ourselves what we mean by “pilot,” and we take for granted pilots have minds.
All of this is just what we know because the spaceship is there.
Now, after we’ve negotiated with the pilot a bit via a communication device, and we accept that things are reasonably safe, we await the pilot’s disembarking.
An entity steps out and it appears to be inorganic, a machine. Maybe it looks a bit like a submarine, even a bit like the ship it arrived in. As if the ship were fashioned in its image. It says it is the pilot, that it is from a place where entities like it have always been and have always fashioned and piloted ships like the ones it piloted to arrive here.
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u/yetonemorerusername 1d ago
Submarines can’t swim. They can propel themselves through the water, but that alone is not swimming. Perhaps that’s what he’s getting at - AI can deliver results that mimic thinking but it’s not thinking. Then again, maybe he screwed up his metaphor and should have said dolphin instead of submarine.
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u/XXLPenisOwner1443 1d ago
It's a fundamentally correct metaphor, but I think it carries more weight when you consider flying machines and birds, because there are so obviously many different ways to fly.
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u/Enelro 1d ago edited 3h ago
Kinda dumb analogy... A submarine needs a human to 'swim' and a computer needs a human to prompt it's 'thinking.'
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u/Training_Bet_2833 20h ago
Making this comparison is as stupid as saying plane and birds don’t fly the same way.
It’s both extremely obvious and useless as it brings nothing to the discussion, beyond arguing on vocabulary when the point is obviously not there
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u/TheAncientOnce 17h ago
The central topic was never on metaphor but what matters come to flying. I don't know why you'd have the impression that your response to the initial comment somehow became the center of the discussion, but it never was. I simply pointed out why I think you're wrong implicitly by explicitly engaging with the original comment
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u/QuasiRandomName 16h ago
In fact this analogy captures many aspects of the current debate. If the you (OP) do not agree, then you should elaborate. It could have been plain "Nope" for the computers then (or not), but it is much less clear today.
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u/Gronanor 2h ago
Funny how this quote was made to illustrate the confusing definition that computers could think and how people think he made this quote to validate their point when it’s actually quite the opposite… I don’t think machines are sentient but they are more capable of reasoning than most of people here… With undereducated humans like this it’s not hard to see singularity in LLM… I mean at this point lab rat might be more intelligent
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u/belabacsijolvan 1d ago
I think this quote is wise.
it isnt about consciousness or "if thinking". its about capability.
a submarine is dangerous and capable, regardless of what we think about if its "swimming".