The Little Thoughts of Thinking Machines
John McCarthy · 1999
When we interact with computers and other machines, we often use language ordinarily used for talking about people. We may say of a vending machine, ‘It wants another ten cents for a lousy candy bar. ’ We may say of an automatic teller machine, ‘It thinks I don’t have enough money in my account because it doesn’t yet know about the deposit I made this morning.’ This article is about when we’re right or almost right in saying these things, and when it’s a good idea to think of machines that way. For more than a century we have used machines in our daily lives whose detailed functioning most of us don’t understand. Few of us know much about how the electric light system or the telephone system work internally. We do know their external behavior; we know that lights are turned on and off by switches and how to dial telephone numbers. We may not know much about the internal combustion engine, but we know that a car needs more gas when the gauge reads near EMPTY. In the next century we’ll be increasingly faced with much more complex