January 6, 2022

The Chinese room

The idea of the experiment is that if you take someone without knowledge of the Chinese language into a room, and give them templates with answers, like "if X -> Then Y", and then get a real native Chinese speaker to write questions, that person in the room would be able to find the matching question and give an aswer, even without understanding the details and knowing Chinese language.

So it means that if someone would have enough knowledge on potential questions and answers, even without understanding the context, they would be able to provide answers, which would be acceptable by the inquirer.

This thought experiment made me think about how things might work in the world, especially in IT and product companies.