Hippolyte
Joseph Weizenbaum
Joseph Weizenbaum died recently. He was 85 years old.
He influenced my adult life than any other writer from my childhood. Before I read Computer Power and Human Reason, I thought I wanted to be a computer programmer. After I read it, especially the chapter on "Science and the Compulsive Programmer," I tried to focus more of my attention on the world outside.
Most of the computer books I tried to read when I was an adolescent were too difficult for me. But Weizenbaum's simple prose was easy for me to understand.
Here's a short quote from the book--
"The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. So, of course, is the designer of any game. But universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs. Morevoer, and this a crucial point, systems so formulated and elaborated act out their programmed scripts. They compliantly obey their laws and vividly exhibit their obedient behavior. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or a field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.
One would have to be astonished if Lord Acton's observation that power corrupts were not to apply in an environment in which omnipotence is so easily achievable. It does apply. And the corruption evoked by the computer programmer's omnipotence manifests itself in a form that is instructive in a domain far larger that the immediate evironment of the computer. To understand it, we will have to take a look at a mental disorder that, while actually very old, appears to have been transformed by the computer into a new genus: the compulsion to program."
Joseph Weizenbaum
Joseph Weizenbaum died recently. He was 85 years old.
He influenced my adult life than any other writer from my childhood. Before I read Computer Power and Human Reason, I thought I wanted to be a computer programmer. After I read it, especially the chapter on "Science and the Compulsive Programmer," I tried to focus more of my attention on the world outside.
Most of the computer books I tried to read when I was an adolescent were too difficult for me. But Weizenbaum's simple prose was easy for me to understand.
Here's a short quote from the book--
"The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. So, of course, is the designer of any game. But universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs. Morevoer, and this a crucial point, systems so formulated and elaborated act out their programmed scripts. They compliantly obey their laws and vividly exhibit their obedient behavior. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or a field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.
One would have to be astonished if Lord Acton's observation that power corrupts were not to apply in an environment in which omnipotence is so easily achievable. It does apply. And the corruption evoked by the computer programmer's omnipotence manifests itself in a form that is instructive in a domain far larger that the immediate evironment of the computer. To understand it, we will have to take a look at a mental disorder that, while actually very old, appears to have been transformed by the computer into a new genus: the compulsion to program."