Human agency, the ability to make history, and usher progress:
"Just as the bomber pilot “is not responsible for burned children because he never sees their village”, Weizenbaum wrote, software afforded generals and executives a comparable degree of psychological distance from the suffering they caused."
"... Bound by an algorithmic logic, software lacked the flexibility and the freedom of human judgment. This helps explain the conservative impulse at the heart of computation. Historically, the computer arrived “just in time”, Weizenbaum wrote. But in time for what? “In time to save – and save very nearly intact, indeed, to entrench and stabilise – social and political structures that otherwise might have been either radically renovated or allowed to totter under the demands that were sure to be made on them.” "
This is an absolutely wonderful synthesis of status quo, the relegation of agency and willful denial of responsibility by replacing humans with technologies and that has only intensified.
As the author notes later:
"Weizenbaum was always less concerned by AI as a technology than by AI as an ideology – that is, in the belief that a computer can and should be made to do everything that a human being can do. This ideology is alive and well. It may even be stronger than it was in Weizenbaum’s day."
What is this"ideology"? It goes something like what the political philosopher Slavoj Žižek wrote: “they know it, but they are doing it anyway”, which he riffs from Marx who wrote of the capitalists, "they do not know it, but they are doing it". Marx himself was riffing on Jesus (from Luke):'Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they're doing".
6/8
#AI #HistoryOfAI #Computing #Critique #Technology #Ideology #ManVsMachine #MIT #Weizenbaum
Karthik Srinivasan /
npub160…76fkd
2023-07-26 02:19:18
in reply to nevent1q…k8xk
Author Public Key
npub160cfnc8ucrqhs3n85wtnhvje5v6sms4jtj0jeg9ltqxgq3meuftq776fkdPublished at
2023-07-26 02:19:18Event JSON
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