Back in the late seventies, when opinions about the possibilities of artificial intelliegence were harder to find but no less broadly speculative, I encountered a wonderful book, both erudite and charming, called Computer Power and Human Reason. I was fascinated by the ideas in it and those it led me to. I was equally impressed by the simple fact of someone thinking at that level. Its author, Joseph Weizenbaum, died a week ago in Gröben, Germany.

What is it, after all, that makes people different from machines? Sure, we die, and they turn off. But do we think differently? Is one of our approaches preferable? This is the kind of stuff Weizenbaum enjoyed considering.

In 1962, he published a comparatively simple program called ELIZA which demonstrated natural language processing by engaging humans into a conversation resembling that with an empathic psychologist. The program applied pattern matching rules to the human’s statements to figure out its replies. (Programs like this are now called chatterbots.) Weizenbaum was shocked that his program was taken seriously by many users, who would open their hearts to it. He started to think philosophically about the implications of Artificial Intelligence and later became one of its leading critics. His influential 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason displays his ambivalence towards computer technology and lays out his case: while Artificial Intelligence may be possible, we should never allow computers to make important decisions because computers will always lack human qualities such as compassion and wisdom. This he saw as a consequence of their not having been raised in the emotional environment of a human family.

He

…saw that computers adjusted human intelligence ‘from judgment to calculation,’ that they privileged mathematical models and instrumental reason as the basis for action, and that they created a paradoxical situation in which computers initially empower humans but will eventually render them powerless. he urged his colleagues not to put themselves in the service of the military and other death industries, and specifically called for computer scientists to refuse to conduct research on projects that would couple organic and mechanical systems, and to avoid speech recognition research because it would profoundly alter the way people understand one another.

Assuming that computer capabilities continue to increase at something like a Moore’s Law rate, they’ll very soon overtake us in the areas of gathering and processing data. They can already land an airplane more precisely and reliably than a pilot and beat the world champion at chess. Will they outperform us at sex and cooking next? Music? The novel? Or will we, the creators, choose to draw some lines and create some definitions? Are some things uniquely human, or is everything an artifact of electricity and chemicals?

These questions are too big for even a particularly gifted thinker to answer alone. But Joseph Weizenbaum helped me realize that questions like these could, and in fact demanded to, be asked.

Joseph, good work, bro. Keep it comin’.

Posted by Chuck Dupree at March 14, 2008 07:36 AM

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