The book “Islands in the Cyberstream: Seeking Havens of Reason in a Programmed Society” is an interview between Joseph Weizenbaum and Gunna Wendt. This is how this books ends:
“It is a widely held but a grievously mistaken belief that civil courage finds exercise only in the context of world-shaking events. To the contrary, it’s most arduous exercise is often in those small contexts in which the challenge is to overcome the fears induced by petty concerns over career, over our relationships to those who appear to have power over us, over whatever may disturb the tranquility of our mundane existence.”
This is actually a quote from his book “Computer Power and Human Reason”. The quote is there because her daughter asked him to read his own book.
Professor Weizenbaum came to fame for creating Eliza, a natural language processing program that explores interactions between humans and machines. You can read more it on Wikipedia here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA. What surprised Weizenbaum was how fast and tight the relationship between humans and the program developed. His own secretary who knew how the program worked feel into deep conversation with the program and even referred to it as “doctor”.
Prof Weizenbaum became a critic of the role of computers in our society, he says he is a social critic not a computer critic. Through the interviews we get to view his insights. When asked about the influence of computer on society he suggests we change perspective and ask “what influence does society have on the computer, on its development and its meaning?” He states the fact that the “computer was born in war and that the military made and sponsored all computer research and advances”. Most great applications of technology end up to be used in the military, in the US context.
The interview gets into discussing misinformation with examples of how war lies were communicated via the television. He says “We can never really be sure if what we are seeing on the television is reality or if it is simulated”.
He gets into discussing technology and its introduction in schools. I quote:
“The screen is not without danger for children. On the one hand – we have talked about this already – because they experience that screens are a source of truth, daily at home. Maybe I should replace ‘truth’ with ‘reality? Children experience reality through the screens. I don’t want to talk about how much time they sit in front of television on average, it is no doubt a lot, but that’s not what this is about.”
This reminds me the challenges we are experiencing with the many hours we are immersed in social media bubbles. How hard it is for our “WhatsApp aunties” to spot AI generated videos. If adults are facing psychological challenges with this exposure, how much would it affect children’s thinking. He goes further into his thoughts on learning:
Referring to learning, what I think is very dangerous is the way that knowledge is picked up from screens. It reaches the watcher without having to exert any kind of struggle. Absolutely effortless – you could say at the push of a button. But that isn’t how we learn. I can only repeat: learning does not mean the piling up of knowledge. Knowledge comes to the learner only with a certain commitment, with a certain effort and struggle, or else it doesn’t stick. It has to be developed, it doesn’t just fall in the lap.
He cautions against ignoring problems that actually exist and engineering problems that technology will solve. For example he says instead of spending budgets on computers maybe we should focus on issues like education feeding programs that play a critical role in how children learn in school.
Through the book we see how Prof Weizenbaum is surprised by how the scientific community views humans as seen in the follow quotes:
Hofstadter’s answer was: Firstly he didn’t worry about it and secondly, the human race is not the most important thing in the universe.
“Another important American philosopher, Daniel Dennett from Tufts University has set the challenge: “We must lose our reverence for life before any real progress can be made in Artificial Intelligence.”
Anyway, today in America only a few people protest the idea that the human is at root just an information processing machine or that pieces of living people can be replaced with artificial organs.
He is very troubled by how many have reduced humans to information processing machines that can be replaced a robot that becomes human. Imperfect machines. He states that “Only a human can confirm the humanity of another human.”
Prof Weizenbaum emphasis on the need for an individual, the island, to be able to critically think on our own. He is against a certain specific laziness, intellectually or spiritually laziness. He says:
In our society we rarely have the opportunity to sail alone on the sea. We live in our society almost completely in the harbor, not always the same one, sometimes this harbor, sometimes that one. And mostly there are other people who are responsible for us. We seldom have the opportunity or we are seldom challenged to truly decide things for ourselves. In our consumer society, for example, it is the advertisements that recommend, you could even say, command what we should do. At a certain degree of wealth we can be lazy – I mean especially intellectually or spiritually lazy.
I first got to hear of Prof Weizenbaum social criticism through the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast. I recommend listening to the episode here https://techwontsave.us/episode/182_ai_criticism_has_a_decades_long_history_w_ben_tarnoff
This a great social critic. Looking forward to getting and reading his book “Computer Power and Human Reason”.
britone mwasaru 