Post

I finally read computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1976 classic “Computer Power and Human Reason.” This book deserves a massive revival in our current age of grotesque and largely thoughtless AI creep into everything:

There’s an enormous amount of stuff in this book I’d like to highlight, but start with: “What emerges as the most elementary insight is that, since we do not now have any ways of making computers wise, we ought not now to give computers tasks that demand wisdom.”

Here is Weizenbaum in 1976 clearly expressing my own view: using AI as a psychiatric tool to treat human beings is not just wrong, it is obscene. I believe we should be using the term “obscene” far more often to describe these perverted uses of AI technology.