[rstuart4133]

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.

[dsco]

See what's strange here is that we would call a dancing robot "dancing", and not think twice about it.

[mjburgess]

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).

[User23]

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.

[throwawaaarrgh]

We do have a dance called 'the robot'