
“Computers Are Useless. They Can Only Give You Answers” (2011) - Tomte
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/05/computers-useless/
======
lordnacho
I'm not sure this quote is as insightful as it's made out to be.

Questions and answers are not a one-way system of thinking. Who hasn't thought
of more questions after being given an answer?

For example, statistics require a computer to calculate. They answer questions
like "what is the unemployment rate?". Once you get a number, say a time
series, you are going to ask "what affects the unemployment rate", essentially
asking what the generating function is. This in turn leads to more and more
calculations, a whole web causality.

So computers are not providing questions any less than answers.

~~~
woodruffw
_You_ asked the question here, not the computer. There is causality there, but
it's one-sided: ask a question, get a response, and use the response to inform
a new question. In other words, nothing about the response _itself_ begs the
question.

Edit: "One-sided" is probably ambiguous. What I mean: You don't ask the
computer _why_ it responded the way it did to your initial question, at least
in any meaningful sense. You understand, abstractly, that the organization of
instructions in the computer's program interacted with the input to produce an
output. You might ask _yourself_ why the response is something unexpected, but
it seems strange to ask a state machine for a reason in the same way that we
might ask a child to justify their dislike of brussels sprout.

~~~
lordnacho
>> You asked the question here, not the computer.

But the computer can be coded to do causal calculus. Which is an elegant way
for it to reason about the observations it sees. The data tells the machine
what is a possible graph of causality, and what is ruled out. Adding more data
changes the graph. Now you could say the machine can't dream up what to try to
measure that's not already there, but I don't see why it's terribly different
from what a person does; a person just happens to have a very wide range of
experiences to draw from.

About the child and the brussel sprout, it's because they don't like the
taste. They don't like the taste because they're evolved to like certain
tastes, where the term "evolved" hides a complex history of genetic
interaction with the environment, and "taste" hides parameters discovered
during this interaction. Essentially, the child has certain priors in his head
about what's good for him. Not all that different from a calculating machine.

Now the child may not understand this, because he can't consciously examine
the chemicals in his brain, but the computer is built in such a way that we
can, so we tend to think the computer is somehow less complex.

~~~
woodruffw
> But the computer can be coded to do causal calculus. Which is an elegant way
> for it to reason about the observations it sees.

I'm not convinced that number-crunching could be fairly cast into the same
pattern of rationality as reasoning. For one, reasoning seems to imply the
potential for a multitude of (not necessarily correct or even veridical)
outcomes - it is possible to reason as a human being about what to eat for
dinner without predicating that on an "acceptable" meal.

In contrast, there is only one (and necessarily veridical) outcome for the
sort of "reasoning" that a computer does. You can make that outcome very
complex by virtue of a very complex program, but any deviation from it would
be something _wrong_ with the machine or program, not just another outcome.

> About the child and the brussel sprout, it's because they don't like the
> taste.

Possibly. It could also be that they've never had them but have heard their
friends complaining about them, or that they just don't like the way they
look.

What's interesting is that any of these would be a reasonable response from a
child (or an adult). Contrast that to the explanations we would accept for a
machine failing to produce the correct outcome - would it be _reasonable_ to
say (beyond in a colloquial sense) that my desktop "didn't like" the input I
gave it?

~~~
lordnacho
>>In contrast, there is only one (and necessarily veridical) outcome for the
sort of "reasoning" that a computer does.

Why? Say a human is driving a car, and a kid steps out on the road, you can
swerve, or you can stop. Same goes with a computer. Except with a computer,
you can have all the stats about the likely outcomes to hand immediately and
choose whichever is marginally better. It's only the right choice to the
extent that the data says one choice is superior to the other. You can easily
imagine that if the choices are close to each other, the machine would just
pick one of them. Or even do whatever improves the data gathering, eg if one
of the choices had been picked a lot less that the other.

In general there's scope for optimization when you have data and calculation
power, but there's also scope for satisficing, ie doing any of several things
that will give an acceptable outcome.

>>would it be reasonable to say (beyond in a colloquial sense) that my desktop
"didn't like" the input I gave it?

Yes. The only difference between the kid and the computer is the kid evolved
naturally, and one of the things he got from evolution is self-interest. Of
course a machine can have self-interest as well, but we don't use the language
of preferences to describe it.

------
qwrusz
Such fascinating comments on here. I think it would be interesting to find a
provocative quote said by a computer scientist about art and then see how
artists debate/discuss the quote's meaning.

My 2 cents on this quote:

1\. This quote is about art. Not about computers. Picasso was an artist (and a
great salesman, PR-man, self-promoter btw). But he didn't know shit about
computers or "calculating machines" or whatever octogenarians called them
"mechanical brains" back then. This quote is about art.

2\. The quote seems to be widely misunderstood by a surprisingly large
percentage of people who don't get it. Firstly, it's just a quote. I'm not
sure why it gets as much attention as it does, but everyone needs to chill. I
feel maybe people get offended quickly by it or get caught up in who said it
and then everyone forgets to read it closely...Here goes:

The quote is illogical. The quote makes no sense. This is prima facie.
Something cannot be "useless" and have a use. Even if a thing has one single
use, it is not and cannot be called, "useless". Assuming computers only give
you answers, that would be a use and so they cannot be called "useless". e.g.
can you say "Thermometers are useless, they only tell you temperature" or
"Easels are useless, they only hold the paintings"? Hopefully you see
illogical structure and fallacy of what he is saying.

Funny how a computer would not accept the logic of the quote. But I don't
think that was intentional.

Next: Without going into to much context on Picasso's view on art and
technology (which he was not against), I think one way to understand the quote
is to flip it: What is the point of art? A question asked by many for a long
time..."Art is useless. It just gives you questions".

~~~
lawpoop
It's illogical, but surely you can see that it's a rhetorical device in the
service of his message.

New knowledge comes from asking novel questions.

I haven't yet seen a computer pose an interest question, something no one has
ever thought of yet. I don't mean questions about art, or meaning, or "What
happened in 1750?" but novel questions in mathematics, cosmology, physics,
etc.

They do seem to be answer-calculating machines.

------
drallison
This seems to be a restatement of Richard Hamming's motto expressed in
_Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers_ (1962):

 _The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers._

See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hamming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hamming).

