Comment by dguest
13 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.
It's embedded in an explanation as to why computer science at the time seemed to have such a strong local character, despite all the homogenizing influences. He partly puts blames on the founders of the field who were "confusing", perusing weird questions like whether computers could think. It doesn't seem strongly tied to the rest of the essay. The rest of the essay is mostly about the overselling of user-friendly computation and how it can corrupt computer science (which, as I said, also seems relevant to the recent AI craze).
Of course his glib dismissal doesn't make the question wrong, it's just a fun quote for those who already believe that human thought could (eventually) mimicked by a machine.
I don't think the original context particularly matters: the quote now has a life of its own. A rock was formed to satisfy the laws of thermodynamics that demanded an efflux of heat, but I can still use it to smash a window.