Labour Day
Happy Labour Day! I don't personally see the point in Labour Day, since surely every working day is a celebration of labour and productivity...but anyway.
Went out for lunch with Luke and Will today, and it was all very fun, random chatting...and Luke happened to mention in the passing that an Apple computer is very very "smart". He meant, of course, that it looked awesome and very slick, but for a moment I thought he was saying that the computer itself was smart (as in, intelligent) and for about half a second, a lot of thoughts went very very rapidly through my head before I realized that wasn't what he was talking about. But anyway, here are those thoughts:
An intelligent computer? Well, you could describe computer processes as intelligent, because they can interpret complex information, learn from their mistakes, calculate, store information, retrieve it...and isn't that similar to what people do? So what computers do is very similar to what humans do, and humans do it by intelligent thinking, therefore computers think...?And computer wires are like human nerves carrying signals...
..but then, computers are programmed - everything they do is planned and put into them by humans....if I programmed a computer to answer 2 + 2 = 5, it could just as easily say that as 4 or 19 or 28, it doesn't know the difference...
...but then, is that really different from people...? I mean, people must be programmed too, though we normally call it "education". I could just as easily teach a kid that 2 + 2 = 83...everything that makes us human and intelligent must be learned...both computers and people must be "taught" before they show intelligence, whether we use the word "programmed" or "conditioned" or whatever....is the human mind really all that different from a computer? Oh wait, he meant "smart" as in "slick". Ah well.
That was just half a second's worth of thought. Feel free to continue the debate :)
In other news...my sister came up to me today (the 11-year-old one) and said: "What's the difference between pulling stage curtains down, and pulling a pair of underwear down?" And completely rattled, I said "I have no idea". And she replied: "When you pull stage curtains down, the show has ended, but when you pull a pair of underwear down, the show's just started".
Absolutely gobsmacked. Kids these days.