Peculiarly vocal, where were all these people when they started calling the machines computers, anthropomorphizing them akin to the original human (most often female) computers that used to run such calculations? And how dangerous the consequences, we've been dead reckoning for 60-70 years with the wrong terminology without course correction!
Where were these vocal people when the "raster-oriented ink deposition machines" were being called "printers"? The meat or machine brains of future historians will melt because they can't handle ambiguity, a word gaining extra -yet similar- meaning! A word with multiple meanings, unheard of!
Where were these vocal people when people started using software terminology like "executing", "calling", "throwing and catching errors", as if software were human -clownlike sure- but human?
Computing is a task. Printing is a task. It’s not wrong to call both a human and a machine a “computer”, because computing (applying an algorithm to an input and producing an output) is literally what they are doing. Same way you can have human and machine diggers, cleaners, calculators and lots more.
Anthropomorphizing comes in when we attribute much more complex behaviors to them - chain of thought, reasoning, intelligence. At that point you aren't talking about mechanical concepts but claiming that these machines are exhibiting human behavior.
Whenever we reason, we are not neurotically bruteforcing the possibilities (although sometimes we do, like proof by exhaustion), usually we make predictions heuristically of which assumptions or theorems apply or might apply. It's not any different for machine proof assistants...
I think a problem is that previously thought, reasoning, and intelligence were always co-occurring, but now we have machines capable of (limited) reasoning that do not think or have intelligence.
They were there, complaining. You just don't remember them because it's easier for the meaning of a word to shift, or at least take on additional contextual meaning, than it is to get people to use a new word once it's reached critical mass. Those people lost the language fight, but were arguably still vindicated, to the extent they were railing against misguided beliefs that equivocated the capacity of the new machines with their human (or more human-involved) predecessor technologies. Who you also don't remember are the people who made extravagant claims and prognostications based on the equivocation.
were they complaining about terminology, or were they complaining about the prospect of losing their jobs?
I'd be happy to revise my opinion if you can demonstrate similar vocal strength on the terminological aspects for those transitions...
You also shifted the goal posts from qualitative to quantitative performance claims. If we ignore that technologies have multiple figures of merit and pretend it's one dimensional, there is a difference between the claim that the machine isn't "printing" vs the machine isn't "printing as well as a human would".
I don't think any of the human printers in the past exceeded the performance levels of current printing technologies, but surely they did exceed the very first machine printers, every technology gets a foot in the door in some niche, and then progressively captures the initially not-yet-automated skills of machine operators.
Would you say an industrial textile weaving machine doesn't weave? At the end of the day its just automation all over again.
Where were these vocal people when the "raster-oriented ink deposition machines" were being called "printers"? The meat or machine brains of future historians will melt because they can't handle ambiguity, a word gaining extra -yet similar- meaning! A word with multiple meanings, unheard of!
Where were these vocal people when people started using software terminology like "executing", "calling", "throwing and catching errors", as if software were human -clownlike sure- but human?
The danger!