Joseph Weizenbaum — creator of the Eliza chatterbot and author of “Computer Power and Human Reason” — passed away recently. Running through all the obits was a quote that seemed to summarize this computing pioneer’s critical perspective on technology:
The Internet is like one of those garbage dumps outside of Bombay. There are people, most unfortunately, crawling all over it, and maybe they find a bit of aluminum, or perhaps something they can sell. But mainly it’s garbage.
This line appeared in outlets from the Wall Street Journal to Valleywag. Caught my eye, too.
The original quotation was in a New York Times article from 1999. But it’s not the whole story.
Weizenbaum wrote a letter to the Times after the article appeared:
I did say that, but I went on to say, “There are gold mines and pearls in there that a person trained to design good questions can find.”
Amazing what a little context can do!
Interestingly, although Weizenbaum’s critique of computing centers on the limitations of algorithmic problem-solving, it was Google’s pattern-matching prowess that unearthed this connection for me. I’d never have found it on my own.
Weizenbaum, whose family fled Nazi Germany in the ’30s, was right to urge us not to discount the value of the human compass in navigating our lives, and not to abdicate our judgment to machines. But I think he might have been a little too ready to dismiss the ability of machines to help us find informational gold and contextual pearls.
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Scott, look at this link to the “Davos Open Forum 2008 – Virtual Worlds – Fiction or Reality?”
I wondered if Joseph Weizenbaum understands one of the deepest mysteries of all time.
Technological progress quietly places an invisible veil between the inevitable progress that it presents to our forward striving and that, which might be called our archetypal relationship to the essential human being and the natural world.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=E198IynGbg0
After I had watched the link to the Davos panel discussion, it was very clear that the moderator, Loic Le Meur, was completely clueless. I would also suggest that he is probably not at all alone in that regard.
I suspect that Wiezenbaum was not critiquing so much the ability of machines to help us find informational gold and contextual pearls as waging an up-hill battle.
A lone voice, in relativity to the huge number of those transfixed by technology, trying to bring balance to the reality that, as you so wisely stated, ultimately it is about the human being!
It might serve each of us rather well to make that veil visible and to consciously understand why we need to do it.
Alan