Maybe I'm stupid, but does he mean that as long as the task at hand is solved it doesn't matter how we categorize it. In the submarine case it would be "move through water", for example. Or is it deeper than that?
To be fair, 10+ years ago this conversation definitely would have been pretty silly. Maybe about as interesting as asking "is there other life in the universe".
No one knows the answer, it's an incredibly over discussed topic, and we won't know for sure for many years.
I think those points still apply to AI intelligence today. However, the power of today's AI greatly outstrips anything Djikstra would have seen in his day.
The point isn't about whether it is unknowable or not - rather does having the answer have any practical value - ie does the attribution of 'thinking' add any value to understanding a program?
The improvement of AI lately doesn't invalidate his point though. I'm sure submarine technology has similarly improved but it's still irrelevant whether or not a submarine can be said to 'swim' not.
Is there something here about the terms being sloppy and unscientific, making the answer somewhat useless? Whatever "swimming" or "thinking" might be, it's not something clearly defined.
> There is also a different approach to the [unification] problem, which is highly influential though it seems to me not only foreign to the sciences but also close to senseless. This approach divorces the cognitive sciences from a biological setting, and seeks tests to determine whether some object “manifests intelligence” (“plays chess,” “understands Chinese,” or whatever). […]
> There is a great deal of often heated debate about these matters in the literature of the cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of mind, but it is hard to see that any serious question has been posed. The question of whether a computer is playing chess, or doing long division, or translating Chinese, is like the question of whether robots can murder or airplanes can fly — or people; after all, the “flight” of the Olympic long jump champion is only an order of magnitude short of that of the chicken champion (so I’m told). These are questions of decision, not fact; decision as to whether to adopt a certain metaphoric extension of common usage.
He's a computer scientist speaking to other computer scientists, so I'd say he's talking about relevancy to computer science.
But I think perhaps you've missed his subtle use of language.
Fish swim, obviously. What submarines do in water isn't usually described a swimming.
That's a bit odd in when you think about it as in both cases the objective is to get from A to B, while in the water. In fact if you look at only the outcomes, what fish and submarines do when swimming looks almost identical. They move (or perhaps be stationary in a current), they tend to be efficient about it, they try to not make a lot of noise, they even use very similar mechanisms to move vertically.
Despite that it almost seems that to swim you have to be fish, or a sea snake, or a blue bottle or water bug - but not a submarine. And going by the discussions here to think you have to be a human, or a dog, or just about anything but a computer. And that's true no matter how closely a computer can emulate tasks we say require thinking in a human.
A conclusion you might draw then is whether a submarine swims deciding belongs in the domain of linguistics, not computer science. And he's saying that's true for whether computers "think" too.
Because robots are built to perform the illusion of being animal-like, and often human-like more specifically.
So there's a theatrical game being played when interacting with these devices that makes them valuable to the people playing that game.
More generally, when the adtech companies selling the current round of AI do the same, without any irony, it's usually a mixture of charlatanism, selling and legal avoidance.
(Eg., that "ChatGPT wrote X" is a kind of theatrical game wherein OpenAI are the material beneficiaries, and most others, are the loosers).
I would call dancing lights “dancing” too. As has already been said, it’s a linguistic issue.
And it’s perfectly reasonable to say a machine “thinks.” It’s just good to understand that it’s a metaphor and not a literal description of what the machine is doing. I avoid saying machines think because it’s confusing, but in principle it’s fine.