Word: weizenbaum
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...such prophecies, M.I.T. Computer Professor Joseph Weizenbaum has answers ranging from disapproval to scorn. He has insisted that "giving children computers to play with ... cannot touch ... any real problem," and he has described the new computer generation as "bright young men of disheveled appearance [playing out] megalomaniacal fantasies of omnipotence...
...everyone is overawed by the so-called knowledge explosion. "What happens," says Computer Scientist Joseph Weizenbaum of M.I.T., "is that educators, all of us, are deluged by a flood of messages disguised as valuable information, most of which is trivial and irrelevant to any substantive concern. This is the elite's equivalent of junk mail, but many educators can't see through it because they are not sufficiently educated to deal with such random complexity." To many experts, the computer seems a symbol of both the problem and its solution. "What the computer has done," according to Stephen...
...irrational thought that have persisted throughout recorded history." Other social critics ask if clear thinking is enough-if, in fact, there might not be a danger in raising a generation to believe that it has the analytical tools to contemplate any problem. Says M.I.T. Computer Science Professor Joseph Weizenbaum: "There's a whole world of real problems...
...from machines. Indeed, man tends to search out such distinctions even as he endows his machines with increasing sophistication, as if to make sure that his evolution is no slower than that of his creations. Still, it is sometimes nerve-racking to read what these boxes can do. Joseph Weizenbaum, of M.I.T., who has recently come to criticize computer education for children as a context for "toy problems," nonetheless got more than a toy gasp out of the public in 1968 when he unveiled his project ELIZA-an IBM 7094 programmed by Weizenbaum to "practice" psychotherapy-and then published...
Some of the most informed apprehensions about computers are expressed by Professor Joseph Weizenbaum of M.I.T.'s Laboratory for Computer Science. Human dependence on computers, Weizenbaum argues, has already become irreversible, and in that dependence resides a frightening vulnerability. It is not just that the systems might break down; the remedy for that could eventually be provided by a number of back-up systems. Besides, industrialized man is already vulnerable to serious dislocations by breakdowns?when the electrical power of New York City goes out, for example. Perhaps a greater danger, says Weizenbaum, lies in the fact that "a computer...