>Setio sam se, kao kroz maglu, J. Weizenbauma i njegove "Elize" (njegova sekretarica koja ga zamoli da izadje iz prostorije, da bi nesto poverljivo rekla masini?),
mozda ce te zainteresovati ovaj tekst:
the first lecture i attended as a graduate student at harvard in 1976 was by the famous computer scientist joseph weizenbaum. he was an early contributor to artificial intelligence (AI) and is best remembered for the program eliza, which fooled people into thinking that the computer was conversing though it was just spouting canned repartee. weisenbaum had just published
computer power and human reason, a critique of artificial intelligence and computer models of cognition, praised as "the most important computer book of the past decade". i had misgivings about the book, which was short on argument and long on anctimony. (for example, he wrote that certain ideas in artificial intelligence, such as science-fiction proposal for a hybrid of nervous systems and computers, were "simply obscene. these are [applications] whose very contemplation ought to give rise to feelings of disgust in every civilized person... one must wonder what must have happened to the proposers' perception of life, hence to their perceptions of themselves as part of the continuum of life, that they can even think of such a thing.") still, nothing could have prepared me for the performance in store at the science center that afternoon.
weizenbaum discussed an AI program by the computer scientists alan newell and herbert simon (ljudi sa carnegie mellona, btw, mog alma mater
) that relied on analogy: if it knew the solution to one problem, it applied the solution to other problems with a similar logical structure. this, weizenbaum told us, was really designed to help the pentagon come up with counterinsurgency strategies in vietnam. the vietcong had been said to "move in the jungle as fish move in the water". if the program were fed this information, he said, it could deduce that just as you can drain a pond to expose the fish, you can denude the jungle to expose the vietcong. turning to research on speech recognition by computer, he said that the only conceivable reason to study speech perception was to allow CIA to monitor millions of telephone conversations simultaneously, and he urged the students in the audience to boycott the topic. but, he added, it didn't realy matter if we ignored his advice because he was completely certain - there was not the slightest doubt in his mind - that by the year 2000 we would all be dead. and with that inspiring charge to the younger generation he ended the talk.
the rumors of our death turned out to be greatly exaggerated, and the other prophecies of that afternoon fared no better. the use of analogy in reasoning, far from being the work of devil, is today a major esearch topi in cognitive science and is widely considered a key to what makes us smart. speech-recognition software is routinely used in telephone information services and comes packaged with home computers, where it has been a godsend for the disabled and for people with repetitive strain injuries. and weizenbaum's accusations stand as a reminder of the political paranoia and moral exhibitionism that characterized university life in the 1970s, the era in which the current opposition to the sciences of human nature took shape.
steven pinker,
the blank slate, p. 105-106.
Edited by Sioran, 13 April 2003 - 19:29.
