NEWS Techno-savvy, education should .be--emphasized by Doug Thompson a Imprint staff “The prospects for Artificial Intelligence are good ” , but the reasons are all wrong according to MIT Computer Science Professor, Joseph Weizenbaum, the 1986 Hagey Lecturer. Speaking Tuesday and Wednesday evenings in the Humanities Theatre, the topics of the two lectures were Artificial Intelligence (Al), and military research. He challenged everyone to think carefully about their research and ask themselves if it was really serving a useful purpose. In a Tuesday morning press conference some of his other concerns, especially about educational priorities, emerged. -/
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The German born computer scientist, who went to the U.S. with his family in 1936, believes that “computer literacy” is about as_ im. portant as bicycle riding, and that _. much contemporary concern wrth the question is misplaced. Children must learn their natural language, and they must learn their history, said Weizenbaum. These are the priori7 ties, and after they have learned these things, if there is time left over, riding bicycles, playing tennis, and tiddlywinks may be good things to teach. The situation of language education in American schools was described by the professor as desperately bad. Eight (80) per cent of MlTfreshmen fail a language proficiency test which requires them to write a paragraph and which “we do not judge that harshly”. “Techno-savvy”, not computer literacy is needed to deal with the computer age, said Weizenbaum. Just as one does not have to be a mechanic to make use of autos, or know Morse Code in order to use the telegraph effectively, one doesn’t need to know the details inside the computer. Generally, according to Weizenbaum, techno-sawy, even among the computer “literate” tends to be poor. In his 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, a text in use at UW, Weizenbaum equates facility with language to the capacity to think, and its links with the capacity to communicate are obvious. He scathingly criticizes technical training which is not built on a foundation of literary and cultural understanding. “The computer is a metaphor” he says, which shapes ideas, and structures thought. But without other metaphors, people become entrapped by its power. In the study of computers, an early objective was to make the machine imitate human thought, and this shed light on the nature of human thought processes. But today, the computer metaphor is being used to explain people, rather
than human metaphors being used to understand how machines should be dealt with. We come to see ourselves mechanistically, and this, for Weizenbaum is a problem. “The problem is in looking at human beings as information processors” says Prof. Weizenbaum. “People are information processors, unquestionably” he adds, “but we are also paper-weights”. The point, obviously, is that we are more than paper-weigh,& or information processors. Nor, he insists, can all problems be reduced to calculation. And human problems, he insists, are not normai?y solvable in the sense that equations can be solved. “Human problems are usually transformed into other problems. He cited the example of divorce as a “solution” to marriage breakdown. “It’s not a solution at all” he insists. It merely transforms one set of problems into another. In effect, it is not a “computable problem”. Artificial Intelligence came in for some satiric lambasting. “People believe in it” he said. And as long as they do, they will continue to spend vast sums researching it, and they will continue to believe that such things as Star Wars might work But, he said, Star Wars will not work. “Whenever I try to tell them that”, he said “they tell me ‘expert systems’ will take care of the problem”. Computers can only help us with problems we understand, and they ought not to be applied to other sorts of problems. He insisted that Al will never replace, nor duplicate human intelligence. “Every behaving organism [people or computers] is a function of its history” he said. To experience life as a human, you have to be a human he insisted. But computers are “behaving organisms”, and they can think machine thoughts. Perhaps, he said, a “cognitive wheel” will be discovered. Like the mechanical wheel, which is , not found in nature, a cognitive
wheel could do some things better than humans, as mechanical wheels can “run” faster than men. But it will never be a replacement for or a duplication of humanity. Weizenbaum identified two kinds of computer research, that motivated by theory, and that motivated by results. The theoretical approach tries to understand what it is doing, the practical, just wants performance. Military money is usually available for the performance oriented research. Performance oriented research appears to be very seductive. The example of chess-playing programs was cited. In the early days, researchers attempted to find out how good chess players played. in the end, they abandoned that effort. Modern chess programs beat most humans by evaluating every possible move, every -possible counter-move, several moves ahead. Then, numerical values are assigned to the evaluations, and the most advantageous is chosen. Millions of moves must be evaluated for each move taken. A human chess player, of course, evaluates only a handful of moves, but the best humans can still beat the best computers. In the end programmers gave up on writing a program that would structurally duplicate the mental processes of a good chess-player, and settled for a program that worked, i.e. it could beat most people most of the time, essentially waiting for the human to make a mistake, something a wellprogrammed computer will not do. Such a program, running on an 8bii personal computer, takes two hours to make a move when programmed to look five moves ahead. That’s a helluva lot of number crunching. The achievements of Al are small, although immense claims are made for them, claims in which people want to believe. In his press conference, Weizenbaum compared
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