Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wolki 2019 days ago
There's nothing wrong with it, it can simply lead to confusion. When computers started, people called them 'thinking machines' and, say, multiplication was something that required some intelligent behavior on the part of the person doing it. There's nothing wrong with calling a calculator a thinking machine that implements intelligent behavior, but it helps if everyone is aware that at other times when people talk about 'thinking' and 'intelligent' they mean something quite different. This is not uncommon; when people use the word 'bank' they refer to very different things: river ones, park ones, central ones, rotations of flying objects etc. But everyone should be aware that getting better at building comfortable banks to sit on in the park is not the same as getting better at figuring out the optimal rate of interest or turning planes. It certainly might, but that is a separate argument and terminology can obscure that.