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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading “Weisenbaum: deciding versus choosing”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26105"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26105"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26112,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26105\/revisions\/26112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}