But How Do It Know? - J. Clark Scott  ## Metadata - Author: **J. Clark Scott** - Full Title: But How Do It Know? - Category: #articles - URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/208364115 ## Highlights - Joe is a very nice fellow, but has always been a little slow. He goes into a store where a salesman is standing on a soapbox in front of a group of people. The salesman is pitching the miracle new invention, the Thermos bottle. He is saying, "It keeps hot food hot, and cold food cold...." Joe thinks about this a minute, amazed by this new invention that is able to make a decision about which of two different things it is supposed to do depending on what kind of food you put in it. He can't contain his curiosity, he is jumping up and down, waving his arm in the air, saying "but, but, but, but..." Finally he blurts out his burning question "But how do it know?" You may or may not have laughed at the joke, but the point is that Joe looked at what this Thermos bottle could do, and decided that it must be capable of sensing something about its contents, and then performing a heating or cooling operation accordingly. He thought it must contain a heater and a refrigerator. He had no idea of the much simpler principle on which it actually operates, which is that heat always attempts to move from a hotter area to a cooler area, and all the Thermos does is to slow down this movement. With cold contents, the outside heat is slowed on its way in, and with hot contents, the heat is slowed on its way out. The bottle doesn't have to "know" in order to fulfill its mission, and doesn't heat or cool anything. And eventually, the contents, hot or cold, do end up at room temperature. But Joe's concept of how the bottle worked was far more complicated than the truth. So the reason for the book title, is that when it comes to computers, people look at them, see what they can do, and imagine all sorts of things that must be in these machines. Or they imagine all sorts of principles that they must be based on, and therefore what they may be capable of. People may assign human qualities to the machine. And more than a few find themselves in situations where they feel that they are embarrassing themselves, like our friend in the joke, Joe. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j64de5wedemjzpwvvhnrjfrt))