CART211: Reading Response

*See main site for the final project proposal.*

The Joseph Weizenbaum article, “From Computer Power and Human reason: From Judgement to Calculation”, was an interesting read. I agreed with a lot of his basic points but don’t agree with his conclusions. I was moved by the passages about science as a creative pursuit and about the limiting of science to calculating the solution to problems as limiting or denying the power and freedom of thought.

That psychologists were so eager for some sort of technology to take over aspects of their jobs surprised Weizenbaum, but being a lazy, hopeful human, I can understand the wistful daydream of finally not doing the tedious parts of my job, delegating it to someone/something else. The way I see it, the training involved in some positions leads to a feeling of having been “programmed”, where individual approach is counter-productive and looking for a way to distance oneself from being the “information processor following rules” is to jump at the chance to have some of that tedious burden lifted by a machine.

Modeling is very important to understanding complicated systems, and there are risks in every model if held too long. The “autonomous machine-like process” in a lot of ways seems to follow from the “factory production” model that was used for nearly everything after the industrial revolution kicked in. Both models dehumanize by minimizing the impact of individuals in the system, while they also put emphasis on efficiency and a non-emotional approach.

Weizenbaum then goes into his reasons against the science “drug” and rationality-is-logicality approach to decision making. The point I found that helped me reconcile this with my belief in the path of questioning (and science) was where he highlighted that science is built “on the shifting sand of fallible human judgement, conjecture and intuition”. What I took away from the article was that science itself is not bad, but the belief in any one part of it can hinder it and make it take on too much of a presence in every-day life.

Constant tearing down and rebuilding can do a lot of good, but I suppose scientists want to move forward, and you can’t do that if you know all you’re standing on is the “shifting sand” of humanity. Losing the assumption of a stable world, the autonomous model really doesn’t look quite as plausible. However there definitely are two different overlapping skill-sets between humans and computers, so there’s no real reason why they must be exactly like us anyway.