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I have always admired Dijkstra and feel sorry for myself for arriving to Austin too late. And this quote is something I wish I could have had a discussion with
by tx 19y ago
I have always admired Dijkstra and feel sorry for myself for arriving to Austin too late. And this quote is something I wish I could have had a discussion with the man about:
"I feel that the effort to use machines to try to mimic human reasoning is both foolish and dangerous. It is foolish because if you look at human reasoning as is, it is pretty lousy; even the most trained mathematicians are amateur thinkers. Instead of trying to imitate what we are good at, I think it is much more fascinating to investigate what we are poor at. It is foolish to use machines to imitate human beings, while machines are very good at being machines, and that is precisely something that human beings are very poor at. Any successful AI project by its very nature would castrate the machine."
- yters 19y agoSeems that was the original rationale behind computers, as intelligence augmentors.
- michaelneale 19y agoMaybe digital computers, yes, but before that a "computer" was more of a job description.