I think for me the article hit peak "oh come on" when it said this: > In fact, the computer does not play chess at all, let alone championship chess. Chess is

I think for me the article hit peak "oh come on" when it said this: > In fact, the computer does not play chess at all, let alone championship chess. Chess is a game that has evolved over centuries to pose a tough but not utterly discouraging challenge to humans, with regard to specifically human strengths and weaknesses. One human capacity it challenges is the ability to concentrate; another is memory; a third is what chess players call sitzfleisch—the ability to resist the fatigue of sitting still for hours. The computer knows nothing of any of these. The author is complaining that airplanes don't flap their wings and submarines don't swim. Sure, it's technically correct, but it doesn't change the fact that airplanes are useful and distinguishing "flying [airplane style]" from "flying [bird style]" usually isn't. This gets particularly egregious when the author talks about military robots: > “The next ethical minefield is where the intelligent machine, not the man, makes the kill decision,” it reads. But no existing or presently conceivable robot will ever make such a decision. Whether a computer kills a man or dispenses a candy bar, it will do so because its program Ah, the robot is killing me "because of its program". It's not DECIDING [HUMAN] it's only deciding [computer]. What a relief. Problem solved. > The “should a man or a robot decide?” debate, then, is wrongly framed. The only correct question is whether the person making the decision will be the designer-programmer of the robot or an operator working with the robot at the moment of its use. There are endless examples of human decisions to create computer systems not anticipating the computer decisions that those systems make. It's useful to then be able to say things like "the car decided to not do anything, to debounce the am-about-to-hit-something signal, which resulted in the death of the cyclist" without having to constantly qualify with "the decision was implemented by a series of hard-coded if-else statements and while loops". Wasting everyone's time with the triviality "an if-then statement isn't a DECISION [HUMAN] it's only a DECISION [COMPUTER]" is not a useful contribution to this particular debate. Applying human thinking terms to computer systems is a useful shorthand. It's not going away.