" If, as appeared to be the case, the public's attributions are wildly misconceived, then public decisions are bound to be misguided and often wrong."

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 a computer understanding of natural language.  In my paper, I had tried to say that no general solution to the problem was possible, i.e., that language is understood on 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 in 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.  The reaction to ELIZA showed me more vividly than anything I had seen hitherto the enormously exaggerated attributions of 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 technologies depend much more on what that public attributes to such technologies than on what they actually are or an or cannot do.  If, as appeared to be the case, the public's attributions are wildly misconceived, then public decisions are bound to be misguided and often wrong.  Difficult questions arise out of these observations; what, for example, are the scientist's responsibilities with respect to making his work public?  And to whom (or what) is the scientist responsible? 

I rather wish I had a "machine read" copy of Weizenbaum's book as I did the article by Carl Sagan, in which he made a number of these mistakes because it would prove what Weizenbaum said here.  Though I'm not sure it would be less work to copy, paste, justify lines, delete ad-copy, etc. to use it.  

While I'm typing this the spell check on Blogger clearly hasn't got the ability to understand that there is a plural of  embodiment.  And, I know from experience, that no matter how many times I acquaint the machine with that plural, it's not going to learn it the way even a relatively unintelligent person would, by exposure to the sound of it.  You have to either come up with an algorithm to make the machine do that - in which case it's merely following a program which is of your intelligent creation, or, more simply, acting to insert the plural form into the dictionary that human beings have also embedded in the program.  It doesn't understand what it's doing anymore than an alarm clock understands the time it keeps or the implications of it in a wider context.*

Among other things re-reading and typing out this passage reminds me of it is the claims of an ideological materialist-atheist, AI fan-boy who is sophisticated enough to also be a critic of the present day claims of "artificial intelligence" made by his fellow journalists, Kevin Drum at Mother Jones magazine.  As he writes about many things it is clear he is ideologically dedicated by his materialism and atheism to intelligence in machines, the Neo-Pygmaleonism of humanly created minds.  I suspect motivated by the naive belief that if human beings can intelligently design a mind, that would negate the possibility of God intelligently creating them when they will ignore the fact that they have merely shown that with the practice of intelligent design - in this case copying some superficial aspects of minds in biologically living beings - people can create something they can believe is like that.  It will have reinforced the idea that intelligent design is required to do that, not negated it.**

I have recently pointed out that atheist-materialists of a scientistic bent aren't the most philosophically sophisticated people, something which Drum has demonstrated before.  I strongly suspect what the more sophisticated atheist Joseph Weizenbaum was frustrated by was the typical English language university grad being a philosophical novice. 

This piece from 2017, criticizing a once popular secular-lefty blogger I have also had issues with (though I agree with him, over Drum, that self-driving cars are a dangerous billionaire corporatist fantasy) Drum insists that it's coming "whether you like it or not." 

 
Atrios today:

    Self-Checkouts

    Those still a thing? I mean, I know they are, but around me the 3 major supermarkets within walking distance got rid of them….Anyway, I know they still exist, but I do think our robot future is not quite as inevitable as people think. Worrying about the impact of future automation on jobs seems to be a cool tech away of ignoring the current fucked and bullshit jobs situation. And, yes, automation has been going on for decades, which is actually my point. There’s nothing new about it, and I don’t know why people think there will be this sudden automation discontinuity. The robots have been here for awhile, and they aren’t really going away, but that doesn’t mean the sci-fi dystopian workless future is just around the corner. Shit is fucked up and bullshit enough without worrying about things which haven’t happened yet, and likely won’t.

It really doesn’t matter if artificial intelligence is distracting us from whatever you think the “real” problem is. It’s coming anyway. The speed of the AI revolution depends solely on fundamental factors (mostly continued reductions in the cost of parallel computing power) and the level of interest in AI software development. The fundamental factors are obviously still barreling ahead, and it sure looks like the free market has a ton of interest too:

I've used self-checkout and it ain't AI, it's using a machine to make the customer do the work of checking themselves out at a grocery store - as my sister pointed out, not giving her a discount for the labor and thought she puts into the process.  The only "intelligence" in the process is that engaged in creating the software and hardware and the intelligence of the person checking themselves out.   To use an analogy I've used when addressing Kevin Drum's claims before, the "intelligence" in the machine is the record of human thinking recorded in a form that is easily called up in an automated fashion, it's no more an example of machine intelligence than an old fashioned library card catalogue or a book index, a rolodex or an alphabetized list.  If you gave a customer a printed out list of prices of specific items with code numbers, they could, if they were suckers enough to do that much work, accomplish the same thing over a much longer time period the old fashioned way.  Of course, the store owner would never do that because it follows an honors system - though I've known of people who ran a farm vegetable stand on one quite successfully.  I have a great nephew who does something similar.  His price list and coin box is nothing anyone would call "artificial intelligence."   Like a paper list the machinery doesn't understand any of it anymore than the paper of the cards or pages or the wood of the drawers or the cardboard of a notebook would.  The meaning of it requires human recognition and interpretation of semiotic symbols invented by and learned by human beings.  As I pointed out back then, Drum was so wowed by the rather banal "accomplishments" of computers that he didn't even notice that the thing didn't really answer his questions, why erasers are so often pink and why his mother said she wouldn't trust an eraser that wasn't pink.  It answered an historical question of when pink was introduced as a color for erasers by a widely used brand of eraser, it didn't tell why they chose that color - the actual pink of the eraser being the product of artificial dyes, not the iron oxide found in the pumice used in them.  Why they used pink, he could have only gotten that from the people who made that choice. 

Yet, as a dedicated materialist and atheist,  Kevin Drum MUST hold an elevated view of the machine - and in his case, because he is someone of intelligence and sophistication, it's in the typical materialist form a a promissory note "guaranteed" to be paid in some future because he knows it ain't here today - because it demotes the mind of the human to a material manifestation in accord with his ideological foundations, even as he is clever enough to see problems with the even more naive faith in "AI" that sees it all around where even he knows it doesn't exist. 

*  I will again recommend Clifford Simack's short-story "Skirmish" in which aliens instill a knowledge of autonomy into even non-electric machines and the start of the war they wage against their human oppressors.  I have not, though, looked up the idiot psychologist who, as I recall, ranked a number of machines on their IQ, as I recall he gave an alarm clock an IQ of 5.  I would dare say that the majority of psychologists who believe that IQ is valid are pretty primitive materialists with a degraded view of human intelligence based in a 19th century mechanistic view of reality.

** A point I made over a renewed claim in the atheist fashionable 00's when it was claimed that artificial DNA that they could get to "reproduce itself" was in the news.  To the claims that it refuted a divine creation of life, along with pointing out that DNA wasn't an organism that could "reproduce itself" but a molecule that it took external chemistry to "self-replicate" I made the even more basic observation that since the experiment was saturated, from start to finish with intelligent design, that they have more proven that it could be a requirement for even the relatively banal accomplishment of getting fake DNA to "replicate-itself" and that it would be logically coherent for someone promoting intelligent design to claim that supported their belief.  Though I pointed out there was no way to use science to address the possibility that God created the first life on Earth because there was absolutely no evidence of that event available for study.  I love messing with their very real minds about that because they inevitably never consider the implications of what they are claiming. 

Update:  It is impossible for human beings to conduct an experiment that would "prove" that intelligent design wasn't necessary to produce the result their experiment did because there is no possibility of there being an experiment which doesn't contain intelligent design as a component.  I would go farther and say that any scenario, any scheme, any mechanism that human beings could theorize or conjecture to "prove" such a non-need for intelligent design would have to explain how they could know that their invented scenario or theory could be known to be possible without the intelligence they exercised in coming up with it.  I'd certainly pick at their claims of having done that on that basis and I'll bet there would be more than one thread that could be pulled that would take their defense of their claim apart, though I'd have to see what they were claiming in that regard before I'd claim that as a definite attribute of such a claim.  Unlike most ideological atheists of my experience and reading, I'm not so stupid as to think I could possibly address all possible cases and come up with a universal rule that would govern all cases. 

That is one of the reasons, and only one, that the entire "science" of abiogenesis is scientific superstition, one of many such atheist-originated and motivated branches of science.  Science is as open to ideological manipulation as scientists allow it to be at any given time, and they've left that barn door wide open.