Week 11 - Computer Power & Reason, 7 Deadly Sins.. - Ars-onist

By the means of technology, is scientific dogmatism prone to alienate the human being? What is reiterated in the two readings is that computers, despite what we believe, have limits. Humans tend to adopt a personification towards objects which has us under and overestimate our understanding of machines. Like with Artificial Intelligence, we are questioning our ethical relationship with modern machines, a fear that is understandable but lacking in throughout consideration. Is the world now a computational machine? Where is our place in this computational world? Or is the machine simply an extension of the autonomous man? As Rodney Brooks clearly stated, the apparent efficient competency of an AI-based system on a particular area encourages an overestimated view on what an AI can and will be able to do in multidisciplinary circumstances. This is quite opposed to Ray Kurzweil and his belief in singularity by the time of 2029. Looking past the Hollywood-tainted vision of what role AI will play in the human society, Brooks affirmed that the humans won't become minority on the job market nor in our daily life in a couple of hundred years. Similarly, the DOCTOR bot which was based on the ELIZA application were both served to automate the process of psychological therapy. Their process raised critical questions on blinded scientific advancement. As illustrated by the secretary example in which she was present during the entire development stages of the DOCTOR bot, the author underlines the omnipresent ignorance in the technological spectrum. By attributing human characteristics to the an artificial presence rather than understanding the hidden process, the secretary chose to delegate the complex psychological therapy process to a primitive set of reflective rules. By this means, Weizenbaum questions the scientific dogmatism which encourages a blind faith in science alienating the human being. To this day, the human psychology has a complexity which struggles to integrate logical scientific procedures. The latter infers that there is no predefined process in a chaotic human ecosphere. Therefore, eliminating the human being with automation out of multidisciplinary field is only a trivial imitation of a small subset of the required skill-set.