Me too, but I am afraid the human end needs to think critically as well. You don't need ML/AI to have people do stupid shit because "computer told them to do so". A good example would be validators bundled with the web OpenStreetMap editor iD, which are good from far, far from good.

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2021-July/086...

I mean, you can't make a hammer and expect it to be as useful to someone without hands or nails.

That's called Augmented Intelligence, a well-trod field and a better ROI than aspects of autonomous and human-replacement intelligence.

There are lots of creatures that can swim. Most of them swim better than a human. That’s why it’s not very interesting when we discover a new one.

In contrast, humans are arguably the only creatures in the universe that can think. Certainly we have never discovered a creature that can think better than a human. Thus it would be highly exciting if we discovered or created one.

>In contrast, humans are arguably the only creatures in the universe that can think.

Citation very strongly required to back up this statement. I'm not aware of any evidence that this is the case, in fact its quite the opposite.

Second. Not sure how "think" is being defined here, but even for a spatial/temporal sense of self or mortality I'd say that's probably an incorrect statement. Let alone the general notion of thinking. E.g. dogs exhibit basic thinking like predetermination, delayed gratification, etc.

How does a creature proactively use tools to more easily prepare/gather foods without "thinking?"

How does a young creature observe an elder doing something, and then copy it, without some form of thought occurring? It seems the elders are teaching the youth, and the youth are learning, but I'm not sure how that can happen without thinking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Cp7_In7f88

The human mind is so flawed I am not sure its a good model to build thinking machines.

no one has a good model of a human mind

Depends on what you mean by good, and what level of detail you expect. People certainly have developed accurate enough models to be able to exploit biases and predict & influence patterns of behavior in others.

I can see that. Its just not something I'm particularly interested in.

I'm not an expert in brains. After taking a few casual courses I saw recommended here, and reading some of the books, I'm suspicious that our story about our own intelligence is somewhat oversold, and we may find that our intelligence is 99% mundane, custom-built automation and 1% story telling. But that story telling is pretty magical.

Buddhism and Modern Psychology

Happiness Hypothesis (which is more about brains than happiness)

There are many humans that think better than, well, average human. If not in all areas of life, but in one or couple of them, at the very least.

Frankly, one of reasons I visit HN is to find these. ;)

Flattering aside, what fascinates me is the difference in thinking - a new approaches, not seen or thought by me.

The thing about that quote is I used to work on AUVs. And we would routinely say "The AUV swims out to a waypoint" or whatever. So, having established in my mind that a machine can, in some sense, swim, talking about a machine thinking made a whole lot more sense. Things like "The computer thinks I'm a different user than I actually am" or "The computer is thinking of a solution that satisfies the constraints" seemed less needlessly anthropomorphizing.

> "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra

Something about that quote always bothers me. I'm not sure what, but if I were to try to express the same fundamental idea, I would probably phrase it as "whether a bicycle can walk".

I think you are missing the point.

A submarine "swims" in the same way an airplane "flies."

But for some reason, in English anyway, we seem to define "swim" such that, by definition, only an animal can do it. Or at least, it must behave similarly to a swimming animal...such as by flapping fins and the like.

Meanwhile we don't think an airplane doesn't fly simply because it doesn't flap its wings.

The point is that semantics tells you very little about reality. And debating semantics is not particularly interesting, or at least a good way of missing the point.

Walking bicycles? Well, ok. That's much more of a stretch, partly because of the fact that there is a human much more directly involved in the propulsion of a bicycle compared to things with actual engines (airplanes and submarines)

I don't know how useful/meaningful any of this is? It's just language quirks, and different languages have different quirks. In Hindi for example the verb 'to walk' is the same as ~'to operate' - so you can 'walk', and 'walk a bicycle', etc.

It's useful when someone asks things like "will machines ever be able to think?"

And you might say "well, define 'think' ". In other words, that's not that interesting a question, since it is more about semantics than about reality.

Or you say it as Djykstra did, which I think is pretty clever.

And yes, your example about how words differ in different languages does a good job of explaining how this is just semantics. If a question becomes moot in a different language, it is a good indicator that the question is less about reality than it is about semantics.

You can read Edsger's handwritten quote in the third paragraph at page EWD898-2.

[0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD898.PDF

Agreed. The thing that bothers me is that the task of swimming is an example of something that is already defined while thinking includes the creation of new definitions.

> 1. "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra

Not sure what he meant by that, it doesn't really make sense to me: thinking yields information and deductions that can be very useful, while swimming by itself accomplishes nothing useful.

Actually, I just can't make any sense of the sentence, because while I have a general idea of what a thinking machine could be, I have no clue what it means for a submarine to "swim", versus whatever the alternative is ("self-propelling"?).

His point was that we might say "submarines aren't actually swimming" while saying "of course airplanes actually fly."

What's the difference? The only difference is semantic, we seem to have defined "swimming" to be arbitrarily restrictive (as in, only applying to animals), while we haven't done so for flying.

Meanwhile, we can say a magnet is attracted to metal, and no one says "wait, it can't ACTUALLY be attracted to it, since that takes a brain and sentience and preferences."

And then, most of us don't bat an eye if someone says "my computer thinks the network is down" or "my phone doesn't recognize my face" or even "the heater blowing on the thermostat is making it think it is hotter than it is." It's not helpful to interject with, "well, thermostats don't really think."

The point is, these are arbitrary choices of how we define words (which may vary in different languages), and they aren't saying meaningful things about reality.

The point is the goal of a submarine is to allow humans to traverse large distances underwater, the semantics of how it does so are unimportant. Similarly the ability of a computer to think is moot, its the results we get from that that matter.

Not a polymath physicist, but I take Djikstra to be saying "don't obsess so much over the differences you fail to see the similarities". The submarine doesn't swim, but it still gets somewhere in the water.

[And a program/computer may not think yet still does interesting computations]