Computers do not think, they are oriented in thought
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CURMUDGEON CORNER
Computers do not think, they are oriented in thought Attay Kremer1 Received: 2 September 2020 / Accepted: 7 September 2020 © Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2020
Poor use of the word “intelligence” is common in most walks of life. It is confused with one’s ability to calculate things without pen and paper, or with whether or not one is well-read. Even in the most unreasonable of places—the study of mental processes and their digital simulation—the word is woefully abused. Most often, it is misused to refer to competence. “This is an intelligent program” usually means “this program automates a task competently.” This is where theories of “multiple intelligences” are spawned and released to wander the earth. But the two are not equivalent. The valuing of competence over intelligence—which yet remains obscured—is perhaps tolerable, but the complete erasure of intelligence in favor of competence is not. Mostly because it would be a shame to lose such a multifaceted word: intelligence stems from the Latin “inter” and “legere.” Their conjoining can be interpreted in a plethora of ways, each an invitation to its own metaphysics. “Legere” was commonly used to refer to “choice” and to “reading”. So that “inter-legere” can be understood as competence in the task of choosing between binary opposition (something which might be better suited to the word “taste”). It might also mean “to read between,” in the sense of reading between the lines, or reading what is not exactly there, but is hiding between what is there. Here interpretation and intelligence conspire. “Legere” also grows out of the endlessly interpretable and confused root that is “Logos.” To be intelligent is to be between one Logos and another (whatever that might mean). Something to be contrasted, perhaps, with “int(r) alligent” – someone who is within a (or the) Logos. Leaving Logos aside, these refer to a certain kind of competence, so that intelligence is understood, in its etymological sense, to mean a specific form of competence, rather than simply “competence,” in its most general sense. The task of deciphering the competence that is intelligence is far
* Attay Kremer attaykre‑[email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
beyond the scoop of an opinion, but untangling intelligence and competence is necessary. We are often confounded into bliss by the competence of computers. Their capacity to automate tasks, and to undertake systematic computations, far out-competes anything recognizably human. Machines are unmistakably superior. However, this does not imply the divine worship of the computer as the God-King of the twenty-first century. This cult—propagated to oblivion in the works of Kurzweil (2000) and Bostrom (2016)—is predicated on the fusing together (confusing) of competence and intelligence. A powerful automator is not necessarily intelligent. Not because it is incompetent, but because it is competent at a particular task, and not necessarily with the task of intell
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