rba@allegra.UUCP (10/17/83)
Excerpts (flames) from "The Computer in Your Future" (a review of \The Fifth Generation.../) by Joseph Weizenbaum \New York Review of Books/, October 27, 1983, pp 58-62. But much more importantly, what Feigenbaum and McCorduck describe here is a world in which it will hardly be necessary for people to meet one another directly. In existing totalitarian societies, 'distortions of values' are eliminated by very unpleasant methods indeed. Professor Moto-oka promises a future in which computers will do that without anyone noticing, let alone feeling pain. No one seems to ask what it may be about today's doctors and teachers, or with the situations in which they work, that causes them to come off second best in competition with computers. The computer has long been a solution looking for problems -- the ultimate technological fix which insulates us from having to look at problems. Students coming to study at the artificial intelligence laboratories on MIT, my university, or Stanford, Edward Feigenbaum's, or the other such laboratories in the United States, should decide what they want to do with their talents without being befuddled by euphemisms. They should be clear that, upon graduation, most of the companies they will work for, and especially those that recruit them most energetically are the most deeply engaged in feverish activity to find still faster, more reliable ways to kill ever more people... But more important: how can the authors' jump from the idea of producing information -- never mind whether that is nonsense or not -- to that of producing knowledge, indeed \the/ 'future knowledge of the world,' be justified. The knowledge that appears to be least well understood by Edward Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck is that of the differences between information, knowledge, and wisdom, between calculating, reasoning, and thinking, and finally of the differences between a society centered on human beings and one centered on machines.