Joseph Weisenbaum, who was born on January 8, 1923, would have been 100 years old today. If you’ve heard of him, it’s probably because of his ELIZA program — the very first chatbot.
But I think his greatest contribution was his well reasoned critique of artificial intelligence. For him, it wasn’t a question of whether we can implement ever more powerful AI capability, but whether we should.
Weisenbaum made a fundamental distinction between “deciding” and “choosing”. An AI can decide many things, only a human has the moral imperative to choose between what is right and wrong.
If we create an AI and have it decide things for us, the moral underpinnings of those decisions are still based on the human choices — and therefore the moral values — that led to those decisions.
Given today’s ever more powerful achievements in artificial intelligence, these questions are more important than ever. In the end, as Weisenbaum observed more than half a century ago, moral responsibility lies not with our AIs, but with ourselves.