To go deeper: some animals act curiously, others with fear, but only a few of them understand what the mirror does and use it to inspect themselves.

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4·
    12 hours ago

    from page 7 of Joseph Weizenbaum’s Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgement to Calculation (1976):

    screenshot of PDF of page 7: Introduction intimate thoughts; clear evidence that people were conversing with the computer as if it were a person who could be appropriately and usefully addressed in intimate terms. I knew of course that people form all sorts of emotional bonds to machines, for example, to mu- sical instruments, motorcycles, and cars. And I knew from long ex- perience that the strong emotional ties many programmers have to their computers are often formed after only short exposures to their machines. What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful de- lusional thinking in quite normal people. This insight led me to attach new importance to questions of the relationship between the individual and the computer, and hence to resolve to think about them, 3. Another widespread, and to me surprising, reaction to the ELIZA program was the spread of a belief that it demonstrated a general solution to the problem of computer understanding of natu- ral language. In my paper, I had tried to say that no general solution to that problem was possible, ie., that language is understood only in contextual frameworks, that even these can be shared by people to only a limited extent, and that consequently even people are not embodiments of any such general solution. But these conclusions were often ignored, In any case, ELIZA was such a small and simple step. Its contribution was, if any at all, only to vividly underline what many others had long ago discovered, namely, the importance of context to language understanding. The subsequent, much more elegant, and surely more important work of Winograd in computer comprehension of English is currently being misinterpreted just as ELIZA was. This reaction to ELIZA showed me more vividly than anything I had seen hitherto the enormously exaggerated attribu- tions an even well-educated audience is capable of making, even strives to make, to a technology it does not understand. Surely, I thought, decisions made by the general public about emergent tech- nologies depend much more on what that public attributes to such technologies than on what they actually are or can and cannot do. If, as appeared to be the case, the public's attributions are wildly mis- conceived, then public decisions are bound to be misguided and

    a pdf of the whole book is available here