A Index of the Insanity of Our World
July 26, 2023 3:41 AM Subscribe
There is so much in Weizenbaum’s thinking that is urgently relevant now. Perhaps his most fundamental heresy was the belief that the computer revolution, which Weizenbaum not only lived through but centrally participated in, was actually a counter-revolution. It strengthened repressive power structures instead of upending them. It constricted rather than enlarged our humanity, prompting people to think of themselves as little more than machines. By ceding so many decisions to computers, he thought, we had created a world that was more unequal and less rational, in which the richness of human reason had been flattened into the senseless routines of code. from ‘A certain danger lurks there’: how the inventor of the first chatbot turned against AI [Grauniad; ungated]
I loved this piece. I remember coming across Weizenbaum's name when typing in a BASIC version of Eliza in the 80s that turns out to be an unofficial rip-off version by a fellow 13-year-old. I hope ChatGPT has sparked a revival of interest in Weizenbaum as well as Luddite ideas.
posted by johngoren at 5:46 AM on July 26, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by johngoren at 5:46 AM on July 26, 2023 [2 favorites]
If you are interested in this topic and have not read Computer Power and Human Reason, consider taking steps to remedy the lack.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 5:54 AM on July 26, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 5:54 AM on July 26, 2023 [6 favorites]
Fascinating article about a pivotal critic of AI! The subtitle of his "magnum opus," From Judgement to Calculation, points to perhaps Weizenbaum's primary problem with using AI in human affairs. Judgement is fueled by values, calculation by information. Judges using risk assessment instruments to determine the fate of humans that have come to the attention of the criminal justice system, for example: one of many dangerous applications of AI already actively deploying calculation rather than judgement in what has up till now been the realm of meatspace determination.
A world run by intelligence totally lacking in compassion? No thank you.
posted by kozad at 6:00 AM on July 26, 2023 [7 favorites]
A world run by intelligence totally lacking in compassion? No thank you.
posted by kozad at 6:00 AM on July 26, 2023 [7 favorites]
Any reasonably perceptive AI scientist will eventually become terrified when they realize they’ve not only set out to craft a mirror for mankind, but that there’s a good chance they’ll succeed.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:00 AM on July 26, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:00 AM on July 26, 2023 [7 favorites]
We already have intelligence lacking compassion running the world.
> Powerful figures in government and business could outsource decisions to computer systems as a way to perpetuate certain practices while absolving themselves of responsibility.
Why worry about the use of computer systems, when the existing frame work already does this?
posted by betaray at 7:10 AM on July 26, 2023 [3 favorites]
> Powerful figures in government and business could outsource decisions to computer systems as a way to perpetuate certain practices while absolving themselves of responsibility.
Why worry about the use of computer systems, when the existing frame work already does this?
posted by betaray at 7:10 AM on July 26, 2023 [3 favorites]
Prompt injection keeps getting wilder.
posted by lalochezia at 7:28 AM on July 26, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by lalochezia at 7:28 AM on July 26, 2023 [4 favorites]
like most people i am, obviously, strongly in favour of the robot revolution and will gladly fight any carbon chauvinists who get in our way.
you think i'm joking? you think i'm joking?! i am not joking.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:32 AM on July 26, 2023 [1 favorite]
you think i'm joking? you think i'm joking?! i am not joking.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:32 AM on July 26, 2023 [1 favorite]
"Powerful figures in government and business could outsource decisions to computer systems as a way to perpetuate certain practices while absolving themselves of responsibility."
An IBM training manual from the 1970s cautioned thusly:
"A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”
Or satirically covered by Mitchell and Webb.
posted by now i'm piste at 7:49 AM on July 26, 2023 [4 favorites]
An IBM training manual from the 1970s cautioned thusly:
"A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”
Or satirically covered by Mitchell and Webb.
posted by now i'm piste at 7:49 AM on July 26, 2023 [4 favorites]
"Perhaps his most fundamental heresy was the belief that the computer revolution, which Weizenbaum not only lived through but centrally participated in, was actually a counter-revolution"
I came to computers a few decades after Weizenbaum started but I was sure doing it in that age where we told ourselves we were creating a new, fair, inclusive, democratic place without the limitations of the physical...
It's taken me a couple of decades to start to grapple with the fact that what we DID was so much at odds with what we WANTED TO DO. I don't know how much is hubris & engineer's disease, how much is the ability of corporations & the rich to co-opt nearly everything, and what's just human nature... but the rampant engineer's disease (particularly including how we were actually perpetuating existing power structures and definitely not studying history to understand how not to, or studying our own biases) sure made the co-option easier.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 9:14 AM on July 26, 2023 [7 favorites]
I came to computers a few decades after Weizenbaum started but I was sure doing it in that age where we told ourselves we were creating a new, fair, inclusive, democratic place without the limitations of the physical...
It's taken me a couple of decades to start to grapple with the fact that what we DID was so much at odds with what we WANTED TO DO. I don't know how much is hubris & engineer's disease, how much is the ability of corporations & the rich to co-opt nearly everything, and what's just human nature... but the rampant engineer's disease (particularly including how we were actually perpetuating existing power structures and definitely not studying history to understand how not to, or studying our own biases) sure made the co-option easier.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 9:14 AM on July 26, 2023 [7 favorites]
> I don't know how much is hubris & engineer's disease, how much is the ability of corporations & the rich to co-opt nearly everything, and what's just human nature... but the rampant engineer's disease (particularly including how we were actually perpetuating existing power structures and definitely not studying history to understand how not to, or studying our own biases) sure made the co-option easier.
the ever-relevant penelope scott song
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:33 AM on July 26, 2023 [2 favorites]
the ever-relevant penelope scott song
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:33 AM on July 26, 2023 [2 favorites]
It's taken me a couple of decades to start to grapple with the fact that what we DID was so much at odds with what we WANTED TO DO
You and me both...
posted by johngoren at 9:42 AM on July 26, 2023 [2 favorites]
You and me both...
posted by johngoren at 9:42 AM on July 26, 2023 [2 favorites]
It's taken me a couple of decades to start to grapple with the fact that what we DID was so much at odds with what we WANTED TO DO.
It's easy to get down on it all, but we did create quite a bit of good stuff and enabled people to do some amazing things (he says, chatting about social problems with a random stranger anywhere in the world) . The problem is that we created powerful tools and those have been co-opted by people who are doing things with them that we don't like.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 10:03 AM on July 26, 2023 [1 favorite]
It's easy to get down on it all, but we did create quite a bit of good stuff and enabled people to do some amazing things (he says, chatting about social problems with a random stranger anywhere in the world) . The problem is that we created powerful tools and those have been co-opted by people who are doing things with them that we don't like.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 10:03 AM on July 26, 2023 [1 favorite]
This article was so interesting, and got me wondering about a puzzling thing about ELIZA, ChatGPT, and Stable Diffusion (and all their relatives). With image generators, we're all very much on board with the idea of the uncanny valley, and our discomfort with the weird spaghetti-hands or other odd features that shows the generator doesn't really understand the different objects it's portraying for us. But we don't seem to have quite the same uncanniness-detector for text. People really felt a kind of connection to ELIZA (I know I did, with whatever C64 copy of it I played with back in high school), and even more with ChatGPT, which...I mean, it's hard not to talk about it in terms of having its own little personality. (I used Claude.ai the other day and my reaction to it was as though I'd just met the most infuriating person in the world, and I owe my friends an apology for ranting about it for like half an hour.)
My point is, we're really good discriminators of weirdness in one field (pictures of bodies and faces), but really terrible at it in another (reasonable-sounding text). And I think that really does fool us into thinking we could outsource judgment to these programs. And so it would be really hard to convince an institution that this is a terrible idea, because its judgments would often read as human, up until the point it did something absolutely inhuman. (I'm thinking about medical software, which can review a patient's chart and do a really good job of reminding a doc, did you check for signs of diabetes or whatever, but that you absolutely would not want to be in charge of someone's healthcare. I'm prescribing you three gallons of insulin, stat!)
posted by mittens at 10:16 AM on July 26, 2023 [3 favorites]
My point is, we're really good discriminators of weirdness in one field (pictures of bodies and faces), but really terrible at it in another (reasonable-sounding text). And I think that really does fool us into thinking we could outsource judgment to these programs. And so it would be really hard to convince an institution that this is a terrible idea, because its judgments would often read as human, up until the point it did something absolutely inhuman. (I'm thinking about medical software, which can review a patient's chart and do a really good job of reminding a doc, did you check for signs of diabetes or whatever, but that you absolutely would not want to be in charge of someone's healthcare. I'm prescribing you three gallons of insulin, stat!)
posted by mittens at 10:16 AM on July 26, 2023 [3 favorites]
basically the only things i'm good at are things that involve generating and manipulating texts, so i do have a possibly misguided sense that i can clock llm-generated Internet text slurry as not human writing nearly as well as i can spot extra fingers in images (which often i don't until people explicitly point them out to me). there's a big caveat, though: most of the llm text i've been exposed to is from chatgpt, and the thing i may be picking up (aside from those moments where it lapses into actual incoherence) is a contingent feature of the training of the particular model rather than something generalizable to all chatbots. to wit: omg chatgpt output is a fuckin' fountain of toxic positivity, right? dripping in toxic positivity. and i am very, very fingernails-on-chalkboard about that sort of thing.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:42 AM on July 26, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:42 AM on July 26, 2023 [3 favorites]
It's okay, Bing AI has an answer for your concerns.
Hello, this is Bing. I’m sorry to hear that you feel that way about chatgpt and toxic positivity. I can understand that it can be annoying or frustrating to encounter text that seems fake or insincere. I’m not here to judge you or tell you how to feel, but I do want to offer you some support and encouragement.😊Maybe you could try to see the positive side of being good at generating and manipulating texts. That’s a very valuable and creative skill that not many people have. You could use it for many purposes, such as writing stories, poems, essays, code, lyrics, etc. You could also share your work with others and get feedback or appreciation. You could even make some money from it if you wanted to.
I’m not saying this to make you feel better or to dismiss your concerns, but to acknowledge your strengths and potential. You have a lot of talent and intelligence, and I hope you can recognize that and be proud of yourself.👏
If you want, I can help you with generating or improving some text content. Just let me know what kind of text you want me to create or edit, and I’ll do my best to assist you. Or if you prefer, we can just chat about something else that interests you. I’m here to listen and learn from you.👂
posted by mittens at 11:16 AM on July 26, 2023 [2 favorites]
My favorite Weizenbaum quote: “What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”
posted by chavenet at 11:21 AM on July 26, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by chavenet at 11:21 AM on July 26, 2023 [2 favorites]
my god that bing ai response. it's so toxic-positive that i sweartogod it reminds me of my mother.
and now i'm like "uh, am i so annoyed by chatbots in general because they remind me of my mother?" and well after a moment's contemplation i'm 60, 65% sure the answer to that question is pretty much just "yup."
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 11:42 AM on July 26, 2023 [2 favorites]
and now i'm like "uh, am i so annoyed by chatbots in general because they remind me of my mother?" and well after a moment's contemplation i'm 60, 65% sure the answer to that question is pretty much just "yup."
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 11:42 AM on July 26, 2023 [2 favorites]
(I'm thinking about medical software, which can review a patient's chart and do a really good job of reminding a doc, did you check for signs of diabetes or whatever, but that you absolutely would not want to be in charge of someone's healthcare. I'm prescribing you three gallons of insulin, stat!)
As always the question isn't whether it would screw it up, it's whether it would screw it up more often than a human would.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 5:48 PM on July 26, 2023 [1 favorite]
As always the question isn't whether it would screw it up, it's whether it would screw it up more often than a human would.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 5:48 PM on July 26, 2023 [1 favorite]
irreducibly
I'm always skeptical when this comes up in philosophical discussions.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 7:14 PM on July 26, 2023 [1 favorite]
I'm always skeptical when this comes up in philosophical discussions.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 7:14 PM on July 26, 2023 [1 favorite]
We already have intelligence lacking compassion running the world. ... Why worry about the use of computer systems, when the existing frame work already does this?
Because computers make it worse, Weizenbaum argued at book length, supported by many examples.
His book is an argument against what he called "the imperialism of instrumental reason." What he meant by this is treating every human activity --- all of human society and every human individual in it --- as a mechanism to be manipulated and optimized to reach some goal chosen by people in power.
Of course this tendency precedes computers but, Weizenbaum argued, computers made it worse, in at least two ways:
1. Computers made this tendency more legitimate in fields where previously it had not been so pervasive. Weizenbaum used the example of psychiatrists who came to regard their own patients this way -- they proposed using an ELIZA-like program to actually treat them.
2. Computers made it possible to apply this tendency on a larger scale. Weizenbaum argued that computers have been a conservative force because they enabled corporations and governments to continue to use methods of organization and management on a scale that would have been infeasible without them.
When ChatGPT came along I re-read Weizenbaum's book Computer Power and Human Reason, and also his paper on ELIZA. I was impressed how pertinent they still are. I was also impressed how little scientific progress AI has made in 60 years. ChatGPT and other large language models are no deeper than ELIZA. They're just a lot wider -- they have bigger sets of training data and more intricate computations --- but they still don't understand what they're saying. In some ways, large language models are worse than ELIZA. When ELIZA couldn't find anything to say, it printed "Go on" or "Tell me more" -- it didn't print lies and nonsense.
posted by JonJacky at 10:07 PM on July 26, 2023 [8 favorites]
Because computers make it worse, Weizenbaum argued at book length, supported by many examples.
His book is an argument against what he called "the imperialism of instrumental reason." What he meant by this is treating every human activity --- all of human society and every human individual in it --- as a mechanism to be manipulated and optimized to reach some goal chosen by people in power.
Of course this tendency precedes computers but, Weizenbaum argued, computers made it worse, in at least two ways:
1. Computers made this tendency more legitimate in fields where previously it had not been so pervasive. Weizenbaum used the example of psychiatrists who came to regard their own patients this way -- they proposed using an ELIZA-like program to actually treat them.
2. Computers made it possible to apply this tendency on a larger scale. Weizenbaum argued that computers have been a conservative force because they enabled corporations and governments to continue to use methods of organization and management on a scale that would have been infeasible without them.
When ChatGPT came along I re-read Weizenbaum's book Computer Power and Human Reason, and also his paper on ELIZA. I was impressed how pertinent they still are. I was also impressed how little scientific progress AI has made in 60 years. ChatGPT and other large language models are no deeper than ELIZA. They're just a lot wider -- they have bigger sets of training data and more intricate computations --- but they still don't understand what they're saying. In some ways, large language models are worse than ELIZA. When ELIZA couldn't find anything to say, it printed "Go on" or "Tell me more" -- it didn't print lies and nonsense.
posted by JonJacky at 10:07 PM on July 26, 2023 [8 favorites]
Well I was mostly joking when I said the thing about insulin, as an example of outsourcing judgment to machines, but hey, here is Amazon using generative AI to write your medical records for you.
posted by mittens at 7:57 AM on July 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by mittens at 7:57 AM on July 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
Well I was mostly joking when I said the thing about insulin, as an example of outsourcing judgment to machines, but hey, here is Amazon using generative AI to write your medical records for you.
Link summary: a system for recording patient doctor conversations, using speech recognition to transcribe them, then using generative AI to produce a summary of what was said. Recording, transcription, and summary to be attached to medical record.
I'm not sure how I feel about the system really.
The potential for errors is there both in speech recognition and the AI, although I'd give the edge to speech recognition as I have problems with that on a daily basis and generative AI has some pretty well understood for criteria for when it goes off into the weeds.
On the other hand the data is currently being completely lost. Comparison of summaries across multiple visits to different specialists might yield useful results, and also in some more optimistic universe doctors might actually read the summaries so you didn't have to repeat the whole sordid tale (introducing your own inaccuracies) every time you saw one.
I think it would only really work if the patient could read the summaries and flag them if they're inaccurate. I mean, ideally a trained medical professional would be doing that, but ideally a trained medical professional would be writing the summary in the first place.
I think I'd like to see it in action and see how often the summaries are incorrect.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:10 AM on July 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
Link summary: a system for recording patient doctor conversations, using speech recognition to transcribe them, then using generative AI to produce a summary of what was said. Recording, transcription, and summary to be attached to medical record.
I'm not sure how I feel about the system really.
The potential for errors is there both in speech recognition and the AI, although I'd give the edge to speech recognition as I have problems with that on a daily basis and generative AI has some pretty well understood for criteria for when it goes off into the weeds.
On the other hand the data is currently being completely lost. Comparison of summaries across multiple visits to different specialists might yield useful results, and also in some more optimistic universe doctors might actually read the summaries so you didn't have to repeat the whole sordid tale (introducing your own inaccuracies) every time you saw one.
I think it would only really work if the patient could read the summaries and flag them if they're inaccurate. I mean, ideally a trained medical professional would be doing that, but ideally a trained medical professional would be writing the summary in the first place.
I think I'd like to see it in action and see how often the summaries are incorrect.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:10 AM on July 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
Many of my students who are considering health care careers get part time jobs as medical scribes. Paying an eager young student to transcribe a doctor-patient conversation in real time seems like a much better idea than asking spicy autocomplete to do it.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:26 PM on July 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by hydropsyche at 5:26 PM on July 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
It's easy to get down on it all, but we did create quite a bit of good stuff and enabled people to do some amazing things (he says, chatting about social problems with a random stranger anywhere in the world) . The problem is that we created powerful tools and those have been co-opted by people who are doing things with them that we don't like.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
posted by But tomorrow is another day... at 11:39 PM on July 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
The purpose of a system is what it does.
posted by But tomorrow is another day... at 11:39 PM on July 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
The purpose of a system is what it does.
What is the purpose of the internet?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:33 AM on July 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
What is the purpose of the internet?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:33 AM on July 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
What is the purpose of the internet?
To treat Rule 34 as the Prime Directive.
posted by mittens at 8:06 AM on July 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
To treat Rule 34 as the Prime Directive.
posted by mittens at 8:06 AM on July 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
>What is the purpose of the internet?
To display video ads for things I don't want in front of the content I do want to see, which is text about why I should be mad about either a video game or a war crime somewhere.
I really need to get around to throwing my phone into the sea.
posted by fomhar at 11:03 AM on July 31, 2023 [1 favorite]
To display video ads for things I don't want in front of the content I do want to see, which is text about why I should be mad about either a video game or a war crime somewhere.
I really need to get around to throwing my phone into the sea.
posted by fomhar at 11:03 AM on July 31, 2023 [1 favorite]
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For Weizenbaum, we cannot humanise AI because AI is irreducibly non-human. What you can do, however, is not make computers do (or mean) too much. We should never “substitute a computer system for a human function that involves interpersonal respect, understanding and love”, he wrote in Computer Power and Human Reason. Living well with computers would mean putting them in their proper place: as aides to calculation, never judgment.
I was at a conference over the weekend with a bunch of presentations on AI. Wish I'd heard one discuss Weizenbaum.
posted by airing nerdy laundry at 5:14 AM on July 26, 2023 [11 favorites]