I like Dijkstra's quote: "The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim."
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.
Yes
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
Here's the context since it's been quoted without providing it.