Comment by dguest
11 hours ago
Reminds me of the Edsger W. Dijkstra quote:
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
Which has often been paraphrased as
The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.
Some might disagree with the relevance but it's a cute analogy.
The whole essay [1] is actually somewhat relevant to modern LLM use for other reasons. He spends a lot of time lamenting the industry's obsession with "user friendly" interfaces which obscure the underlying complexity of the problem at hand.
I think this quote is often misunderstood. It isn't really about machines, but about English definition of swimming (and thinking): a living creature moving in water. That makes debating whether submarines can swim rather pointless. You can replace it by "can airplanes fly?" and the meaning changes because we colloquially say that yes, airplanes fly. In Russian, for example, submarines definitely swim (I believe Dijkstra himself mentioned it at some point). I personally believe that defining thinking as something only humans are capable of is rather narrow.