"No people"'s comments only seem to be worth enough in attention currency once things explode and it turns into an "I told you so".
At least within the world of facehype.com and hypper.com et al. Behind closed doors people are probably more critical.
It's the kind of criticism that leaves room for genuine acceptance of the technical excellence and usefulness of those tools, while not buying the hype in the slightest.
EWDs are a gold mine. He's an exceptional thinker and his prose is beautiful.
books listed at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra#Selected_pu...
1) A Method of Programming.
2) A Discipline of Programming.
Browse the EWDs and read those whose titles interest you. My favourites are those dealing with Program Correctness and Languages.
Note that understanding Dijkstra can be hard; so don't be discouraged if you don't "get" something at the first read.
On the cruelty of really teaching computer science: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1036.PDF
How do we tell truths that might hurt?: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.htm...
The humble programmer: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340...
The notational conventions I adopted and why: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1300.PDF
The Mathematical Divide: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd12xx/EWD1268.PDF
Why American Computing Science seems incurable: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd12xx/EWD1209.PDF
Next time use this: "Is it your belief that we are all idiots?"
From: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/misra/Speeches.dir/Banquet-W...
Having said that, I don't think any serious AI researcher would claim that their creations are close to actually thinking.
I don't think anybody seriously believes that -- but setting reasonable public expectations from emerging technologies is at least in part the responsibility of the "technically literate class" broadly defined, research scientists, practitioners, even developers in ML/AI-adjacent fields such as myself.
Stuff like "GPT3 is coming for your job" is already out to the press. Nobody thinks that, nobody has even said that, but nobody has done anything to set expectations straight either.
We ought to be more responsible in this respect.
Which is pretty freaking cool.
But yes, your deeper point is hard to dispute; this business has always run on punctuated equilibrium. We may be in for another 50+ years of "AI winter." I doubt it, though. It feels different this time.
Some said it though, I remember a prominent AI professor talking about radiologists losing their jobs on twitter and the ensuing mess surrounding it.
Except that, I agree strongly with everything else you pointed out.
It doesn't mean it is right, but it is a good reminder that there is a high chance it is just me missing something.
As for the "marketing" thing, it is hard even for a full time teacher not to treat their audience as idiots and avoid losing them completely. Good teachers, when unsure, prefer to go the "idiot" path, not ideal, but at least your audience may understand something in the end.
Now even though Submarines (usually) have propellors, one can easily imagine a design that used limb-like oars to propel it. Does this mean that such a strange submarine is swimming?
The point Dijkstra was making is that the comparison is pointless: there is a fundamental difference between an organism swimming and a machine moving through water. Trying to equate these two actions is pointless, since it adds no new depth of understanding. He therefore dismisses the question of "can machines think" as having no usefulness.
I don't think that his statement is meant to be an answer, rather, I think it's meant to be a statement to jump off of. It's bringing up how definitions matter, and that in different contexts the answer to the same questions could be yes or no.
My intent in quoting was to point out how careless usage of words in AI can fool people, especially the layperson and create wrong expectations. Most can see the difference in the usage of word 'swim' w.r.t fish and submarines, but public knowledge about AI is not at the point where they can make a similar distinction when using 'think' or 'chat' between human and machine.
He uses it differently though, he's using that sentence to criticize Alan Turing's early hypothesizing about AI. If you're interested, that document linked has more context.
"...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."
In the same "post" he also talks a lot about hype and how it hurts the field. The last few years of computing have been exceptionally hype driven, even more than usual. We could've been better with a few more critics like him in that period.
[0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd08xx/EWD898.PDF