JOSEPH WEIZENBAUM continues:
I was startled to see how quickly and how deeply people conversing with DOCTOR became emotionally involved with the computer and how unequivocally they anthropomorphized it. Once my secretary, who had watched me work on the program for many months and therefore knew it to be merely a computer program, started conversing with it. After only a few interchanges with it, she asked me to leave the room. Another time, I suggested I might rig the system so that I could examine all the conversations anyone had had with it, say, overnight. I was promptly bombarded with accusations that what I proposed amounted to spying on people's most 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 musical instruments, motorcycles and cars. And I knew from long experience that the strong emotional ties many programmers have to their machines. 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. 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.
The first thing that struck me about this was the demand for privacy from his secretary and the outrage that Weizenbaum mused about collecting the "interactions" people had with his computer program to see what could be learned from those. I couldn't help but remember the idiotic outrage that people had when they learned that the NSA was collecting the most minimal of data on online communications, not even the content of the things people had willingly put online, voluntarily and sent to other destinations over the WORLD WIDE WEB as if there is any such thing as a securely private communication over such a thing. Did they expect their computers to keep their intimate secrets, secrets they had opted to share, in many cases presumably with people they had never actually so much as seen? For all they knew they could have been sending them to cleverly programmed computers, as indeed, they do whenever they surrender personal information as required to access a program or to buy something online.
As if the computers were going to honor their right to privacy and not share it with other computers going through countries with no legal rights to privacy recognized, through other networks controlled by gangster dictators and perhaps as bad and in some cases worse gangster mobs, corporations.
The Edward Snowden crimes, the actions and writing of his collaborators like Glenn Greenwald and the many in the media and on the stupider part of what gets called "the left" and the stunning, superstitious and ignorant naivety of all of them taught me an enormous lesson of the kind that Weizenbaum described here. What he records in 1975 is not only well advanced in coming true, it's obviously the non-reality of a very, very large segment of the educationally credentialed population, especially those on the alleged left who, by dint of their innocent faith in machine integrity and intelligence, are suckers of the most pathetic kind. Just notice how sometime in the coming weeks or months Edward Snowden, a man who certainly handed over everything he had to both the Chinese and Putin governments to save his ass from being extradited to the United States is going to be treated like some kind of a hero on the idiot lefty news sources, especially the secular ones.
The emotional attachment to machines is a problem but the faith people have in them and the consequences of using computers on the internet, the readiness to be controlled by them without the beginning of a realistic view of what's happening is here and now.
This problem which Joseph Weizenbaum talked about more than forty years ago is extremely dangerous, the manipulation of the gullible, the malleable, the stupid while being college-credentialed and others has become a very serious and fatal disease for democratic governance. In case you wonder why I consider his book so important.
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