An extensive letter from Edsger Dijkstra to my 19 year old self (1989)
Whenever I come across some new AI hype thing in the wild with the usual buzzwords, a sentence Dijkstra wrote way back sort of flashes through my head. It always reminds me to be careful and precise with words.<p>"...the question of whether Machines Can Think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim."<p>In the same "post" he also talks a lot about hype and how it hurts the field. The last few years of computing have been exceptionally hype driven, even more than usual. We could've been better with a few more critics like him in that period.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd08xx/EWD898.PDF" rel="nofollow">https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd08xx/EWD898.PDF</a>