Exploring the question of whether submarines can swim
By: Danielle Boccelli
Tags: AI, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Computer Science, NLP

Exploring the question of whether submarines can swim

An Argument for Verified Humans (Part I)

As I read, I often get lost in the text, my thoughts diverging from the author’s words toward something related yet different. This process seems almost like a conversation between the author and me, with a person’s words provoking my response. At times, I enjoy this aspect of reading, but more often, it is quite distracting.

Still, if I find the thoughts especially compelling (and if a pen is within reach), then I write them down in a place where they can be occasionally reviewed until I find them either ruinously obvious or oblivious to accepted fictions; less often, I build and branch until the original note takes on enough of its own life to become an article, a project, or a poem.

Such was the case when I read the following paragraphs from Deep Learning with PyTorch¹ about a text response produced by OpenAI’s GPT-2 model (which has since been bested by GPT-3):

That’s remarkably coherent for a machine, even if there isn’t a well-defined thesis behind the rambling. Even more impressively, the ability to perform these formerly human-only tasks is acquired through examples, rather than encoded by a human as a set of handcrafted rules. In a way, we’re learning that intelligence is a notion we often conflate with self-awareness, and self-awareness is definitely not required to successfully carry out these kinds of tasks. In the end, the question of computer intelligence might not even be important. Edsger W. Dijkstra found that the question of whether machines could think was “about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.”

These few sentences have inspired in me a handful of tangents that I want to follow here to support propositions for (1) human verification on social media platforms and (2) transparency regarding the use of artificial intelligence in communication tasks. To do so, I will go over each bolded bit from above one by one, and to keep things interesting, I will not do so in order.

Rather, can submarines think?

I admit that I do not know the original context of Edsger Dijkstra’s quote (having only seen it applied in myriad secondhand contexts), and thus my understanding of its intentions may be limited. However, it seems as if the example aims to highlight the innate irrationality of any questions into machine thinking by drawing a comparison to the question of submarine swimming, which somehow seems more obviously unquestionable.

I have two issues with Dijkstra’s quote: (1) it is entirely correct, as there is no true difference between a machine thinking and a submarine swimming; and (2) it stealthily cows the interpreter of the quote — perhaps unintentionally — into accepting the premise that submarines cannot swim, which, as I will argue, is not necessarily true.

…suppose we build a submarine with arms to paddle and legs to kick, one that could navigate the murkiest depths without intervention and respond to danger in real time

On the surface, there seems to be a fundamental difference between asking if a machine thinks and asking if a submarine swims, as swimming is a physical action undertaken by all sorts of creatures to maneuver through liquids, while thinking is a fairly mysterious cognitive experience that we assume is shared by beings who are similar to ourselves (i.e., other humans). However, upon diving deeper, one finds that these questions are essentially equivalent.

Suppose I replaced “to maneuver through liquids” in the paragraph above with “who want to maneuver through liquids.” For all intents and purposes, these two phrases impart the same meaning; however, the second highlights a hidden cognitive component of swimming that suggests that the action is done with purpose. For example, in contrast to an actor swimming, an actor maneuvering through water without intention may be said to drift or to drown, depending primarily on the outcome, and an object controlled by a separate actor may be said to be driven or to be controlled (i.e., to be passive in its action). Therefore, a question of swimming is essentially equivalent to a question of thinking.

Furthermore and interestingly, it seems as if the hidden component is more important than the cognitive component to the classification of a movement through water as swimming. For example, a person may be comfortable claiming that a fish swims, as even the most feebleminded of fish seems to have a certain amount of control over its cold-blooded body as it maneuvers through water. However, would it be correct to say that a eukaryote swims by the flick of a tiny flagellum? Perhaps yes, even still, as the thing, when viewed under the microscope, seems to just go without external manipulation.

But a submarine? Well, we know that humans make submarines go, whether directly through steering or indirectly through programming, and so it does not seem as if a submarine swims. But suppose we build a submarine with arms to paddle and legs to kick, one that could navigate the murkiest depths without human intervention and respond to danger in real time? My guess: Not even then.

The pointlessness of semantic arguments

As discussed above, both questions referred to in the original comparison ask about the unseen processes undertaken by an actor; however, there is no reason why we cannot say that a submarine swims or that a machine thinks, other than a certain linguistic reluctance to do so. Specifically, whether a machine thinks depends on whether we find it appropriate to refer to the actions undertaken by a computer as “thinking,” and likewise for a submarine swimming. Thus, the questions are not worth asking — not because they are either true or false, but because they are entirely dependent on semantic interpretation and are thus neither true nor false. However, taken out of context, as the quote often is, it may seem as if, to be on the side of reason, one must agree with the premise that a submarine cannot swim, which could lead one to conclude — without doubt or ambivalence — that machines cannot think.

Taken out of context…it may seem as if…a person must agree with the premise that a submarine cannot swim, which could cause the person to conclude that machines cannot think, which…is neither true nor false.

Note that I am not claiming that Dijkstra wanted to bully anyone into admitting that a submarine cannot swim, nor am I disagreeing with his statement, as I believe his intention was rather to state the pointlessness of such semantic arguments when there are more interesting subjects on which to expend breath (or keystrokes). Even still, as I will discuss in the next part, machines have a certain non-negligible potential for deceptiveness when they are programmed to perform tasks that are inextricably linked to human cognition, such as those requiring human language to be wielded, as such tasks were (correctly) thought to be performed only by humans until recently.