Mastodon Feed: Post

Reblogged by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):

thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io ("Thomas 🔭✨") wrote:

People need to read more old books.

This is from one that's near 50 years old and explains succinctly why replacing humans with AI is bullshit--even if the AI can think on the same level as humans (current AIs can't, and will likely never be able to).

(Weizenbaum was a computer science professor at MIT and famously invented the ELIZA bot, so yes, he knows what he's talking about.)

Attachments:

• [..] The possibility of programming computers to perform one task or another that humans also perform (i.e., whether Artificial Intelligence is achievable or not) is irrelevant to the question of whether computers can be put to a given task. Instead, Weizenbaum asserts that the definition of tasks and the selection of criteria for their completion is a creative act that relies on human values, which cannot come from computers. Weizenbaum makes the crucial distinction between deciding and choosing. Deciding is a computational activity, something that can ultimately be programmed. Choice, however, is the product of judgment, not calculation. In deploying computers to make decisions that humans once made, the agent doing so has made a choice based on their values that will have particular, non-neutral consequences for the subjects who will experience the outcomes of the computerized decisions that the agent has instituted. (remote)