HackerTube.dev

Richard Feynman: Can Machines Think?

Lex Clips · 2.5M views · 2019-11-26 · 18:27

Open on YouTube ↗

If playback is restricted in your region, try opening the original video. Use Mark watched to add it to your marked videos.

Overview

An excerpt of Richard Feynman's 1985 lecture Q&A about whether machines can think. He discusses the difficulty of defining what computers can never do and compares machine intelligence to machines that don't copy animals.

On Hacker News

HN uses it as an early authoritative take in debates about AI, reasoning, and AGI.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2022–2025

Topics

Consciousness & cognitionAI & data (other)Fundamental physics
Search by tags
feynmanartificial intelligenceturingreasoninglecture

What people said

EGreg · 2024-10 · Recommendation

Relevant — decades earlier, Righard Feynman discussing AI like a boss. He discusses exactly the problems being solved in the article with the Haar approach, but from his time. He mentioned Lenat, who was the OG and who the “LeNet” by Yann LeCun was named after probably (it is mentioned in the article). [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗
EGreg · 2025-11 · Reference

Nah. I don’t “feel the AGI”. I think the AGI is a silly quest, just like having a plane flap its wings. Feynman had it right in the 80s: [VIDEO] I think the future is lots of incremental improvements that get replicated everywhere and humans outclassed in nearly every field, where they stop relying on each other. As far as LLMs yes I think they are the best placed to know if some code or invention is novel, because of their vast training. Can be far better than a patent examiner, if trained on prior art, for instance. What you’re not used to is an LLM being fed stuff that you statistically / heuristically would expect to be average but is in fact the polished result of years of work. The LLM freaks out, you get surprised. You think it was the prompts. The prompts are changed, the END result is the same (scroll to the bottom). I want to see whether foundational LLMs can be used as a good first filter for dealflow and evaluating actual projects.

Read the original HN comment ↗
lostmsu · 2025-10 · Reference

It hinges assuming that ChatGPT does not thinking, which is clearly false. Hell, Feynman said as much in 1985. [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗

Sources

Video by Lex Clips, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

Views, duration and playback status refresh separately from the published catalog. When an update fails, existing data remains visible.

Selection checks
  • SaaS & AI candidates: Topic keywords do not match
  • Editor-approved picks: Editorial review is required

Rule matches identify candidates. They do not guarantee video quality or financial results.

About the library and its sources