What an oversimplification. Thinking computers can create more swimming submarines, but the inverse is not possible. Swimming is a closed solution; thinking is a meta-solution.

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yongjik 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Then the interesting question is whether computers can create more (better?) submarines, not whether they are thinking.

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gwd 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think you missed the point of that quote. Birds fly, and airplanes fly; fish swim but submarines don't. It's an accident of language that we define "swim" in a way that excludes what submarines do. They move about under their own power under the water, so it's not very interesting to ask whether they "swim" or not.

Most people I've talked to who insist that LLMs aren't "thinking" turn out to have a similar perspective: "thinking" means you have to have semantics, semantics require meaning, meaning requires consciousness, consciousness is a property that only certain biological brains have. Some go further and claim that reason, which (in their definition) is something only human brains have, is also required for semantics. If that's how we define the word "think", then of course computers cannot be thinking, because you've defined the word "think" in a way that excludes them.

And, like Dijkstra, I find that discussion uninteresting. If you want to define "think" that way, fine, but then using that definition to insist LLMs can't do a thing because it can't "think" is like insisting that a submarine can't cross the ocean because it can't "swim".

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goatlover 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Reading the quote in context seems to indicate Dijkstra meant something else. His article is a complaint about overselling computers as doing or augmenting the thinking for humans. It's funny how the quote was lifted out of an article and became famous on it's own.

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD867...

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handfuloflight 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Then you're missing the point of my rebuttal. You say submarines don't swim [like fish] despite both moving through water, the only distinction is mechanism. Can AI recursively create new capabilities like thinking does, or just execute tasks like submarines do? That's the question.

	▲	gwd 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Can AI recursively create new capabilities like thinking does, or just execute tasks like submarines do? That's the question. Given my experience with LLMs, I think that they could, but that they're handicapped by certain things at the moment. Haven't you ever met someone who was extremely knowledgable and perceptive at certain tasks, but just couldn't keep on target for 5 minutes? If you can act as a buffer around them, to mitigate their weak points, they can be a really valuable collaborator. And sometimes people like that, if given the right external structure (and sometimes medication), turn out to be really capable in their own right. Unfortunately it's really difficult to give you a sense of this, without either going into way too much detail, or speaking in generalities. The simpler the example, the less impressive it is. But here's a simple example anyway. I'm developing a language-learning webapp. There's a menu that allows you to switch between one of the several languages you're working on, which originally just had the language name; "Mandarin", "Japanese", "Ancient Greek". I thought an easy thing to make it nicer would be to have the flag associated with the language -- PRC flag for Mandarin, Japanese flag for Japanese, etc. What do do for Ancient Greek? Well, let me see it looks and then maybe I can figure something out. So I asked Claude what I wanted. As expected, it put the PRC and Japanese flags for the first two languages. I expected it to just put a modern Greek flag, or a question mark, or some other gibberish. But it put an emoji of a building with classical Greek columns (), which is absolutely perfect. My language learning system is unusual; so without context, Claud assumes I'm making something like what already exists -- Duolingo or Anki or something. So I invested some time creating a document that lays out in detail. Now when I include that file as a context, Claude seems to genuinely understand what I'm trying to accomplish in a way it didn't before; and often comes up with creative new use cases. For example, at some point I was having it try to summarize some marketing copy for the website; in a section on educational institutions, it added a bullet point for how it could be used that I'd never thought of. The fact that they can't learn things on-line, that they have context rot, that there's still a high amount of variance in their output -- all of these, it seems to me, undermine their ability to do things, similar to the way some people's ADHD undermines their ability to excel. But it seems to me the spark of thinking and of creativity is there. EDIT: Apparently HN doesn't like the emojis. Here's a link to the classical building emoji: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1F3DB

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3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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npinsker 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s a great answer to GP’s question!

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DavidPiper 3 days ago | parent [-]

It's also nonsense. (Swimming and thinking are both human capabilities, not solutions to problems.)

But of course here we are back in the endless semantic debate about what "thinking" is, exactly to the GP's (and Edsger Dijkstra's) point.

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handfuloflight 3 days ago | parent [-]

Swimming and thinking being 'human capabilities' doesn't preclude them from also being solutions to evolutionary problems: aquatic locomotion and adaptive problem solving, respectively.

And pointing out that we're in a 'semantic debate' while simultaneously insisting on your own semantic framework (capabilities vs solutions) is exactly the move you're critiquing.

	▲	DavidPiper 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> And pointing out that we're in a 'semantic debate' while simultaneously insisting on your own semantic framework (capabilities vs solutions) is exactly the move you're critiquing. I know, that's the point I'm making.