Preface

When in the debate about the possible humanness of computers the MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum was hard pressed to concede that computers can be “socialized”, he found that they could but in an extremely limited sense. He then stated:

If both machines and humans are socializable, then we must ask in what way the socialization of the human must necessarily be different from that of the machine. The answer is, of course, so obvious that it makes the very asking of the question appear ludicrous, if indeed not obscene. It is a sign of the madness of our time that this issue is to be addressed at all. (Weizenbaum, 1976, p. 210)

For Weizenbaum the answer was so obvious that he even did not bother to give it. He probably thought that, as science progressed, the answer would eventually become obvious to everyone in the field anyway. But this did not happen. The opposite happened. Today, nearly half a century later, it is common “knowledge” among scientists and in a wide public that computers will, sooner or later, be human-like. Some think that computers already are.

So was Weizenbaum eventually proven wrong? Was he, who reasoned about the future of the computer world, about the “digital age”, as thoroughly as nobody else, unable to foresee a future where the difference between humans and machines would become blurred, as many in the AI community want to make us believe, a development which, if it actually happened, would have a transforming impact on the future of mankind? In the decades following his above statement, Weizenbaum actually never distanced himself from it. Quite to the contrary, he was more and more convinced that a serious misdevelopment was occuring in man’s attitude toward computers. So before we discuss his decades old statement as one caused by lack of fantasy and made obsolete by scientific progress, we had better take pains to delve into the scientific-philosophical depths of the man-machine issue. This is what

this book is about. Unfortunately, this issue is not only, and predictably so, an extremely complex one, but, more importantly, the whole debate is also plagued by a deep ignorance about the nature of human mental processes, about the human psyche. This need not surprise us, because the debate is largely dominated by engineers, mathematicians and information scientists. Sadly, psychologists, actually the specialists responsible for the very mental functions the computer scientists intend to emulate, have contributed little to instructing those computer scientists about the nature of human mental functions or the grave definitional problems that plague the science of psychology. They rather decided to ride the computers-can-be-human-like wave and thus furthered rather than criticized that flawed project, promulgating even such outlandish ideas as that of computers becoming superintelligent or even superhuman, and that they eventually will take over control of the world from those outmoded creatures that used to be called humans.