Joseph Weizenbaum



Joseph Weizenbaum (8 January 1923 – 5 March 2008) was a German American computer scientist and a professor at MIT. The Weizenbaum Award is named after him. He is considered one of the fathers of modern artificial intelligence.

Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation (1976)

 * Our ignorance of brain function is currently so very nearly total that we could not even begin to frame appropriate research strategies. We would stand before the open brain, fancy instruments in hand, roughly as an unschooled labourer might stand before the exposed wiring of a computer: awed perhaps, but surely helpless. A microanalysis of brain functions is, moreover, no more useful for understanding anything about thinking than a corresponding analysis of the pulses flowing through a computer would be for understanding what program the computer is running. Such analyses would simply be at the wrong conceptual level. They might help to decide crucial experiments, but only after such experiments had been designed on the basis of much higher-level (for example, linguistic) theories.

Quotes about him

 * [On his anti-AI stance] “He fell out of the field ten years ago, and hasn’t done a damn thing since ELIZA,” one MIT colleague said contemptuously. An old friend of Weizenbaum’s shook his head sadly. “I have the impression that if Joe could do science, he wouldn’t be doing this. When I gave a talk about my AI work a couple of years ago at MIT, it was Joe who came up to me—and I can’t tell you the feeling he said this with— that he’d give his right arm to have done what I’d done. MIT is an incredibly competitive place, and regardless of whether you have tenure, the pressure to produce is terrific. Joe hasn’t produced science, so he’s got to do something. I wish he hadn’t chosen this.”
 * p. 369
 * The abuses might be either ideological or technological. If human intelligence were more successfully mirrored in the machine, will that not justify treating human beings as if they were MERE machines? [Weizenbaum’s] position on this is colored by the experience of Nazi Germany; but the argument is confused. The most savage tyrannies that I can find in history, including Nazism, had no doubt about a unique élan vital...
 * Joshua Lederberg, p. 371
 * Weizenbaum went on to say that the geriatric robot was not only a sign of the authors’ lack of humanity; it symbolized the utter lack of humanity in anybody associated with the field of artificial intelligence. This, of course, was his main agenda; he’d been literally rubbing his hands together (I heard from Michael Dertouzos, one of his colleagues) as he roamed the halls of MIT, where he was then on the faculty. “This’ll get them,” he said to whoever would listen.
 * p. 440, in reference to