“From Computer Power and Human Reason”from “Judgment to Calculation”

by Joseph Weizenbaum

Part One:

Introducing ELIZA

ELIZA/DOCTOR

A program that would take in natural language and produce “natural”

language responses in the vein of a Rogerian psychotherapist.

ELIZA/DOCTOR

Rogerian psychotherapy, also called Person-Centered Therapy (PCT),

involves:

1. genuineness2. empathy

3. unconditional positive regard

ELIZA/DOCTOR

are limited. are formulaic.

result more from the willingness of the users than from the ability of the

computer. (non-directive method)

The interactions

ELIZA/DOCTOR

are a parody.

Weizenbaum chose to represent ELIZA as DOCTOR since it avoided the

problem of having a library of real-world knowledge.

The interactions

ELIZA/DOCTOR

1. “Nearly completely automatic form of psychotherapy”

ELIZA/DOCTOR

2. People became “quickly and ... very deeply...emotionally involved with the computer and anthropomorphized it.”

ELIZA/DOCTOR

3. ELIZA “demonstrated a general solution to the problem of computer understanding of natural language.”

ELIZA/DOCTOR

Weizenbaum was appalled by the rise of responses 1-3.

They missed the point as well as extrapolated the intent of his

experiment to an ill-conceived end.

Part Two:

Science as creative and subjective

“[S]ciene is creative”

“[T]he creative act in science is equivalent to the creative act in art”

“[C]reation springs only from autonomous individuals”

“[S]ciene is creative”

“[T]he creative act in science is equivalent to the creative act in art”

“[C]reation springs only from autonomous individuals”

Is this claim worth investing in?

“[S]ciene is creative”

“[T]he creative act in science is equivalent to the creative act in art”

“[C]reation springs only from autonomous individuals”

Is this claim worth investing in?

What are the equivalences between

scientific creation and

artistic creation?

“Scientific statements can never be certain; they can be only more or less credible”

A scientist “must believe [a] hypothesis together with [the supporting] theories and assumptions”

What forms credibility?

How does ELIZA/DOCTOR counter or play into our ideas of credibility and

objectivity?

“Scientific statements can never be certain; they can be only more or less credible”

A scientist “must believe [a] hypothesis together with [the supporting] theories and assumptions”

Weizenbaum goes on to say“the attribution of certainty to

scientific knowledge...has virtually delegitimized all other ways of

understanding.”

Why are art and science seemingly mutually exclusive?

Weizenbaum goes on to say“the attribution of certainty to

scientific knowledge...has virtually delegitimized all other ways of

understanding.”

Part Three:

Weizenbaum's monster

1. “What is it about the computer that has brought the view of man as a machine to a new level of plausibility?”

“Ultimately a line dividing human and machine intelligence must be drawn.”

What is separating these poles?

2. How has “man...come to yield his own autonomy to a world viewed as machine”?

“The instruments man uses become, after all, extensions of his

body...internaliz[ing] aspects of them in the form of kinesthetic and perceptual

habits”[Recall Haraway and Turing]

3. In what sense have people “ceased to believe in—let alone trust—[their] own autonomy, [and have] begun to rely on autonomous machines”?

Recall Latour's argument from “Iconoclash”, Daston & Galison's on

objectivity, the Oulipo's view of literature, etc.

Part Four:

The core question

“The question is whether or not every aspect of human thought is reducible to a logical formalism, or, to put it into the modern idiom, whether or not human thought is entirely computable”

“What aspects of life are formalizable?”

Weizenbaum claims“For the only certain knowledge

science can give us is knowledge of the behavior of formal systems, that is,

systems that are games invented by man himself”

“When science purports to make statements about man's experiences, it bases them on identifications between

the primitive objects of one of its formalisms”

“What aspects of life are formalizable?”

Are people completely comprehensible?

What about “fallible human judgment, conjecture, and intuition”?

“Of what technological genus is man species?”