Weizenbaum examines computers and society

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Joseph Weizenbaum Computer

Notes

You might have said "What is the role of computers and bicycles in education?" Then I would have said, "Why the bicycles?" and you "Why the computer?"

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And once one has identified the urgent problems, then one can perhaps say, "Here is a problem for which the computer seems to be well-suited."

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What are the problems of the educational establishment?

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The first priority has to be, it seems to me, to lend to those to be educated a mastery of their own language so that they can express themselves clearly and with precision

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second priority is to give students an entree to and an identity within the culture of their society

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prepare people for living in a society in which science is important

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my belief that what primary and secondary schools teach about computers now is either wrong or can be learned by a reasonably educated person in a few weeks

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even if one could show that the introduction of the computer into schools actually effected an improvement, say for example in reading scores, even if one could show that, the question, "Why can't Johnny read?" must still be asked. There is a very good reason that questions of that kind are uncomfortable

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Why is there so much poverty in our world

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education has a very much lower priority in the United States than do a great many other things, most particularly the military

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It is much nicer, it is much more comfortable, to have some device, say the computer, with which to flood the schools, and then to sit back and say, "You see, we are doing something about it, we are helping," than to confront ugly social realities.

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I think the computer has from the beginning been a fundamentally conservative force

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What the coming of the computer did, "just in time," was to make it unnecessary to create social inventions, to change the system in any way.

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It was a whale of a lot of fun attacking those hard problems, and it never occurred to me at the time that I was cooperating in a technological venture which had certain social side effects which I might come to regret

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present "smart weapons" will seem like the wind-up toys compared to the weapons we will have once we've entered the use of the fifth generation of computers

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"if I don't do it, someone else will." Of course if one takes that as an ethical principle then obviously it can serve as a license to do anything at all

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technology itself is neutral and value-free and it just depends how one uses it. And besides – consistent with that – we can't know, we scientists cannot know how it is going to be used. So therefore we have no responsibility. Well, that is false.

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if the question arises of how a specific device is going to be used, in what I call an abstract ideal society, then one might very well say one cannot know. But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious

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I should think that if concern were very widespread, if it were deep-rooted, then perhaps progress in computer development might be somewhat slower than it is

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if we're after antitoxins and other medicines, then let us work on that. To work on that by way of working on bacteriological warfare seems to us insane

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My greatest concern is that these young people won't ever be permitted to grow up, ever to get as old as I am now

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