About Me

My photo
I have a burning need to know stuff and I love asking awkward questions.

Sunday, January 29, 2012


“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra

4 comments:

wstachour said...

I would protest this observation in that thinking is infinitely more interesting / amazing than swimming. Fish swim, which gives us a sense of what's involved. But thinking is orders of magnitude more improbable; few creatures can do it. What the computer does may not be thinking (yet!), but soon enough it will do a good imitation, and who is to say what follows that?

CyberKitten said...

The way I read the quote was as a dismissal of the usual argument put forward that computers are incapable of thought because they're not 'us'.

That sounds like a typical prejudiced 'meat' response to the thought that a machine could do what we do. Interestingly, of course, we still don't understand exactly how we think - so to dismiss the idea of machine thinking (or any kind of non-biological thought) is rather previous and presumptuous..... Of course the irony of the whole thing is when we finally *do* understand how our thinking works it will be a doddle to recreate it in machine form.... [grin]

wstachour said...

I wonder about the advances of computer technology such that many things done today can ONLY be done by computer, to include some kind of computer programming. At some point this will all leave we mortals behind, even if we must remain a vital link in the chain.

None of this is "thinking" of course, but it's fascinating (to me) just the same! (I love how Asimov's Robot Series grappled with much of this. I know you and dbackdad have read much more sci-fi than I; computer intelligence must be a recurring theme, no?)

CyberKitten said...

wunelle said: At some point this will all leave we mortals behind, even if we must remain a vital link in the chain.

We're probably only a few generations away from fully autonomous AI. Once that happens it will accelerate away from us at an ever increasing pace. Not long after its emergence no human mind will be able to understand it.

wunelle said: I know you and dbackdad have read much more sci-fi than I; computer intelligence must be a recurring theme, no?

I'm just coming to the end of reading 10 SF books based on a variety of Future Earth's. You would expect that computers & AI would feature heavily in them.... rather surprisingly, not so much.....