Intelligent Enterprise

I learned of the March 5 death of computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum from a posting on the CPSR e-mail list. CPSR, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, recognized Weizenbaum with their Norbert Wiener Award in 1988. But he was of course best known for creating Eliza, a mid-'60s computer program that conducted natural-language conversations, notably mimicking a psychotherapist's interview with a patient. Eliza was named for the character in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (familiar as the source of the musical My Fair Lady), someone who was similarly taught to impersonate something she was not. Weizenbaum wrote in his 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason, "Eliza created the most remarkable illusion of having understood in the minds of the many people who conversed with it."

Weizenbaum did pioneering work in artificial intelligence and, in particular, dating to the '60s, in natural language processing. Computer scientists have now been working on language-understanding systems, which remain of great current interest, for decades. But Weizenbaum had broader concerns. He considered the computer, as represented in Computer Power and Human Reason, in a sense "merely as a vehicle for moving certain ideas that are much more important."

Weizenbaum observed, "the quest for control is inherent in all technology," control of course being based on simplified, measurable, programmable models of reality. He rejected "nothing but" thinking that would equate these reductionist frameworks — "reason... is nothing but reckoning" — with "authentic human experience."

Weizenbaum wrote in his 1976 book,

The New York Times has already begun to build a "data bank" of current events. Of course, only those data that are easily derivable as by-products of typesetting machines are admissible to the system. As the number of subscribers to this system grows, and as they learn more and more to rely on "all the news that [was once] fit to print," as the Times proudly identifies its editorial policy, how long will it be before what counts as fact is determined by the system, before all other knowledge, all memory, is simply declared illegitimate?

In this quotation, substitute "Google" for "the New York Times" and "the Web" for the references to the "data bank" system. Weizenbaum foresaw this substitution three decades ago:

Soon a supersystem will be built, based on the New York Times data bank (or one very like it), from which "historians" will make inferences about what "really" happened, about who is connected to whom, and about the "real" logic of events. There are many people now who see nothing wrong with this.

While I wouldn't claim that Weizenbaum foresaw a Web populated by user-generated content, the emergence of social media does not detract from a 2008 rendering of his 1976 forecast: to be on-line is to be perceived.

Weizenbaum as a humanist and Weizenbaum as a computer scientist who focused on language technologies developed hand-in-hand. "Human language in actual use is infinitely more problematical than those aspects of it that are amenable to treatment by [Claude Shannon's] information theory... Language involves the histories of those using it, hence the history of society, indeed, of all humanity generally."

Doug Schuler wrote the CPSR list, "According to the EE Times, Joseph Weizenbaum died on March 5. He was a dedicated and compassionate defender of humanity. In terms of technocratic critique he provided important lessons for the generations that followed him. I hope that his wisdom is not entirely lost as the human enterprise moves into the 21st century."