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Weizenbaum’s Computer Power And Human Reason

Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum was first published in 1976. My interest in ethics had not, until recently, steered me toward it, but having now obtained a copy and considered Weizenbaum’s arguments, I’m quite pleased I did.

It is not a book about computers, or programming, or “computer science,” or even an anti-AI screed. Rather, I’d call it a set of increasingly intense philosophical essays about what computers are capable of and what they should be used for, two things that are not necessarily the same, as well as what it means to be human and what it means to be ethical.

Weizenbaum holds that “computers,” speaking broadly, may eventually exhibit what we might call intelligent behavior, but that behavior, limited by the digital switching of 0’s and 1’s, will be that of aliens and fundamentally different; they cannot ever have human intelligence. Why? Because humans have self-directed goals and purposes and wills, and interact with the world in a fundamentally different way (having experiences rather than data). We can both exhibit and feel pride and cowardice, fear and joy, all qualia, and mostly importantly, we can judge matters, rather than simply make decisions, based on our unique, relative experiences. While computers excel at laborious bureaucratic tasks beyond any single human, they cannot ever have the human experiences that actual humans use as the foundation for their values, which then allow humans to make judgments.

Weizenbaum repeatedly quotes a former colleague that challenged him to come up with something a computer could do that a judge (presumably of the legal variety) could not, with their answer being a flat “nothing.” The vigorous humanism of his book-length rejoinder is something to behold. Not only does he castigate the slippery-slope, positivist argument that human-like AI is inevitable as with all technological progress, but he twists the knife further, noting the decision to pursue AI research blindly is itself inhuman. As computers cannot judge like humans, they cannot be ethical, and Weizenberg warns that they should not ever be given work that involves judgment. There are hints of the networked world-to-come in his chapters, but just like anyone in 1976, he doesn’t see just how quickly miniaturized, networked computers are coming.

What he does see clearly are the ethical concerns. He notes any future speech recognition will ultimately only serve the cause of increased surveillance – check. Weizenberg was the programmer behind ELIZA, the famous therapist chatbot, and was alarmed at how quickly some people connected to its lines of code like it was a real human being.

What would he think of modern speech recognition and generative AI? Nothing good. My earlier assessment of ChatGPT is more or less the same as his description of the limits of AI, though he pushes it much farther, noting (even as today) the increased dehumanization and automation of modern society, and lamenting the passive acceptance of a overly computerized future where humans cede more and more power to computers that can never have any real knowledge of human experience, and accept, without thinking, an overly technical approach to complicated human problems.

There are two related passages I’d like to replicate here as they spoke to me as a sometimes disgruntled English professor:

During the time of trouble on American university campuses, one could often hear well-meaning speakers say that the unrest, at least on their campuses, was mainly caused by inadequate communication among the university’s various constituencies, e.g. faculty, administration, students, staff. The “problem” was therefore seen as fundamentally a communication, hence a technical, problem. It was therefore solvable by technical means, such as the establishment of various “hotlines” to, say, the president’s or the provost’s office. Perhaps there were communication difficulties; there usually are on most campuses. But this view of the “problem” – a view entirely consistent with Newell and Simon’s view of “human problem solving” and with instrumental reasoning – actively hides, buries, the existence of real conflicts…

… instrumental reason converts each dilemma, however genuine, into a mere paradox that can then be unraveled by the application of logic, of calculation. All conflicting interests are replaced by the interests of technique alone.

p. 266

This man certainly worked at a university.

The last chapter, “Against the Imperialism of Instrumental Reason,” is a powerful attack on a soulless worship of reason as inhumane. The climax of the argument, for me, is this:

The lesson, therefore, is that the scientist and technologist must, by acts of will and of the imagination, actively strive to reduce such psychological distances, to counter the forces that tend to remove him from the consequences of his actions. He must – it is as simple as this – think of what he is actually doing. He must learn to listen to his own inner voice. He must learn to say “No!”

Finally, it is the act itself that matters. When instrumental reason is the sole guide to action, the acts it justifies are robbed of their inherent meanings and thus exist in an ethical vacuum. I recently heard an officer of a great university publicly defend an important policy decision he had made, one that many of the university’s students and faculty opposed on moral grounds, with the words: “We could have taken a moral stand, but what good would that have done?” But the good of a moral act inheres in the act itself. That is why any act can itself ennoble or corrupt the person who performs it. The victory of instrumental reason in our time has brought about the virtual disappearance of this insight and thus perforce the de-legitimization of the very idea of nobility.

p.276

Bravo. The closing chapter is quite strong, but I’ll limit myself to one more paragraph:

… It is a widely held but a grievously mistaken belief that civil courage finds exercise only the context of world-shaking events. To the contrary, its most arduous exercise is often in those small contexts in which the challenge is to overcome the fears induced by petty concerns over career, over our relationship to who appear to have power over us, over whatever may disturb the tranquility of our mundane existence.

p. 276

When we do not think what we choose to do matters, that is a remarkably good indicator that it does.

The insidious nature of the worldview, then, that Weisenbaum critiques is a mental trap that shuts down what makes us human – our will and agency.

Computers, by the end of the book, become a metaphor or tool for understanding what makes us human – and what does not. There is a very powerful assembled argument that the highly specialized knowledge that computer science and data-driven research claims to possess is at a serious disadvantage when compared to the comfortable familiarity with ambiguity in the humanities. The discussion of language models and composition in earlier chapters suggests Weizenbaum was not field-cloistered from literature and writing – this is a interdisciplinary work.

When I read such arguments, I think about the contemporary anti-intellectual politics of Florida and Texas, but I also think about the larger awareness of the “rhetoric of science” concept since the writing of this 1976 book and the mixed and increasingly sour bag of candies that the Internet turned out to be. I also think about every interaction with a corporate entity I’ve ever had, and how my own university works.

It’s hard to find a print copy of this book, but an ebook version is not difficult to find. I highly recommend it. It has aged well. As a closing thought, the epistemology of The New Rhetoric seems quite capable with Weizenbaum’s ideas here as a reckoning with WWII, though his examples primarily concern Vietnam.

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Book Reviews Politics Short Essays Writings

Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Appreciated

I was in McKay’s outside Nashville recently and picked up a copy of Shirer’s 1960 The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I know probably too much about the Second World War, but I haven’t read many of the one-stop-shop accounts – and for 1960, it’s excellent.

What about 2023, though?

Well, after reading Shirer’s archival account of Hitler’s rise, one might be less than sanguine about the prospects of German absolution, much less reunification, but here we are. Still, several theses hold up well:

First, Shirer is adamant that all the senior Nazi leaders and their adjutants knew exactly what they were doing. No “banality of evil” nonsense is allowed. University professors, captains of industry, concentration camp guards – none get a pass. Hitler seduced them, sure, but they wanted to be seduced, many to the level that they believed the lies, and they seized the dark opportunities for power that were offered them with full responsibility.

Second, Hitler’s rhetorical power is acknowledged. As a reporter in prewar Germany, Shirer was present at many key speeches and witnessed their power over the crowd and over radio. His description of Goebbels’s evil talents at propaganda are also acute. Shirer is not as deft as Kenneth Burke at describing exactly how Hitler’s rhetoric works, but he does a fine job of outlining the cumulative effects on the German populace of the Nazi Party’s constant lying, Hitler’s fixation and reliance on the perceived humiliation of Versailles, and how fascistic antisemitism became the Reich’s state religion.

Third, Shirer does an excellent job of depicting the people around Hitler as an enabling pack of cunning lowlifes and shitheels, as well as the extent of his eventual mental and physical deterioration. No Nazi comes off well; even the many conspirators against Hitler in the army are roundly criticized for their repeated cowardice and incompetence.

I would give a more mixed appraisal of Shirer’s focus on diplomatic maneuvering. He is keen to work in every shifty conversation or telegram, German, Russian, British, or French, no matter how irrelevant it might have been to the outcome of, say, the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty. I would forgive him for this, given the “first draft of history” feel; better to include than exclude. One of the benefits of the abundance is a good sense of the timing of events – Hitler/Stalin/Mussolini/Chamberlain are often waiting for a telegram before they make a move, and a tactical delay here and there seems to have shaped events more than I would have thought.

The emphasis on military history is strangely variable and mostly from an eagle’s-eye view. Shirer examines Hitler’s mistakes-in-hindsight, mostly – the delay before Dunkirk, the following collapse of Operation Sea Lion, the neglect of North Africa, and the absolute disaster of Barbarossa that drove the final nail into the coffin. Overall, the message is that Hitler’s political cunning and ruthlessness was good for a military head start against the Allies, but there was no vision, industry, or luck that would have allow winning a long multi-front war against much larger nations, much less when a paranoid maniac was running the strategy. His uninformed assumptions about American resolve and industrial capacity proved particularly fatal.

The chapter on the Final Solution is brutal. It comes relatively late, serving as something of a flashback as the mechanisms were all in place well before 1939 or even 1936. Scattering it to and fro, however, would have done the subject a disservice. Better to foreshadow broadly and then hit the reader with a shovel. Again, Shirer is relentless. They knew what they were doing.

But back to 2023. I found it extremely difficult to not think about January 6, 2021 when reading Shirer’s account of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. There are important differences – the Nazis were trying first for Munich, not Berlin and the Reichstag; they were better organized and had something resembling a workable plan, though Hitler was not smart enough then to have firm army support; and the Munich police ended it with a strong show of force. Jan. 6 was slightly more spontaneous, and right at the Capitol during a critical vote with minimal police protection that just barely held. But the rhetoric, down to the “make Germany great again” language (Shirer offers just that translated snippet from one of Hitler’s speeches), is the same. They are the enemy – take back your country.

Trump was never quite a fascist, though – more fascist wannabe, fascist-adjacent, fascist-fanboy. Fascism requires the use (and worship) of military force as the primary function of the state. Trump failed to annex or conquer Mexico, North Korea, Germany, Syria, or any other country that bugged him; his fascination with the U.S. military’s power and how dictators can wield it more brazenly was about bragging rights.

He didn’t really have a choice, though. Hitler eventually won over his generals and made them do his twisted bidding out of sunk-cost fallacy self-interest. The Wiemar Republic’s professional holdovers from the monarchy were profoundly different from the constitution-oriented, nonpolitical officer core of the U.S. military. Indeed, the Pentagon’s visible and non-visible efforts to keep Trump out of trouble for four years largely worked (apparently it was sometimes as simple as just sitting on a crazy order until he forgot about it); Shirer is at pains to show that Hitler’s generals, most of which were blamed and purged after Barbarossa, could never really stand up to him.

The final images of the book are the pitiful leftovers of Hitler’s inner circle at Nuremberg – stripped of their scary uniforms and authority, they are nothing more than guilty old men. There is little to be done with them save hang them, and yet the book, with its unsparing accounts of Nazi atrocities, serves as a possible answer to the existential problem of the 20th century: how can we prevent another Nazi Germany, another Holocaust? Shirer, by beginning with Hitler’s early political life, sits firmly in the camp of understanding how it formed: seemingly, out of sheer rhetorical cunning and the willingness of a fair amount of Germans to believe lies and half-truths that made them feel better about themselves. Ultimately, Hitler gave them the hate that they wanted to feel.

With the right mix of political conditions and a skilled public speaker without scruples, decency, or limits, it could happen anywhere.

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Book Reviews Short Essays Writings

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Still, in 2023

While I have read Robert Heinlein’s entire oeuvre, I keep about a dozen on hand for periodic re-reading. This summer I re-read The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, which concerns a revolution of a large convict colony of the Moon from Earth.

TMIAHM, published in 1965, is a good entry to Heinlein for an adult who’s never read him before, and a more than reasonable argument exists that it’s his best book. The author surrogate, Professor de La Paz, is less intrusive, especially since Manny, the narrator, handles the more cultural exposition, and Heinlein’s ideas are so numerous, creative, and rapidly introduced by a fast-moving plot that an occasional lecture or anecdote isn’t out of place, and even welcome as a breather.

Science fiction is a literature of ideas, it’s said, and Heinlein’s big idea through his career could be summarized as technology drives culture. Some examples:

AI: “Mike” or “Mycroft” is depicted as a trickster baby with limitless knowledge that needs to learn behavior and morals from humans – and he learns a solid set from a bunch of heart-of-gold convicts on the Moon. Not only that, but a transgender AI that is occasionally “Michelle” when talking to Wyoming (who insists “her” sense of humor means she is definitely a “she.”) On top of running seemingly every computational need for the Moon colony, the AI is capable of rapid, accurate, and convincing text generation, including poetry, as well as voice and video impersonation. The passages where Mike generates his first video persona could have been written today. Also, while Manny is the narrator, Mike could be considered the book’s protagonist. Without him, the revolution wouldn’t have succeeded, and it’s left ambiguous as how much he directed its implementation as opposed to being a friendly technological asset. Either way, only the Loonies recognize and appreciate his sentience.

Matriarchal society: A lack of females on the moon and a relative scarcity of wealth has led the convicts there to form a matriarchal society with line marriages providing stability and capital retention. The narrator, Manny, is a relatively new husband in the Moon’s oldest line, and he is quite aware (and leans into) the notion that Mimi, the senior wife, runs things and has veto power over the family, including the revolution he’s stumbled into running. Manny vets new recruits to the revolution by bringing them home for dinner to be approved by Mimi, which over the course of the novel nets a new wife (Wyoming), daughter (Hazel), and co-husband (Stu).

Libertarianism > Communism/Democracy: The Lunar revolution has Marxist trappings, but the governmental philosophies that de la Paz attempts (and largely fails) to push the Loonies toward are mostly libertarian. Heinlein creates a frontier society where a lack of laws and structure is beneficial to survival and growth. The aforementioned line marriages are an example of adaptability that Earth societies don’t have (when Manny visits Earth late in the book, he is arrested for polygamy, which outrages everyone on the Moon, especially the women). Heinlein assumes cultural innovations (themselves a kind of technology) happen in response to technological pressure (in this case, the extremes of colonizing and surviving on the Moon), and while this also implies the Moon has a superior culture than Earth, the later attempts of the Loonies to write a constitution suggests that they will end up just like Earth eventually. de la Paz’s brass cannon story summarizes, humorously, this innate tragedy. If the essential Western plot is the decline of the West, this is the beginning of the end for Luna’s unique culture; they won the revolution, and now they get to decline into committee work.

The revolution has a cell structure that benefits both from the technological assistance of Mike and the relative incompetence of Earth’s governor, as well as de la Paz’s Alinsky-style strategizing: he knows, and at one point states explicitly, that it is easier to get people to hate something than love something. These huge advantages are largely played for comedy, such as Mike’s incessant Spock-like recalculating of their exact odds of success, but this also reinforces the strengths of Luna’s value set. For example, instead of just using Mike to keep the lights running as Earth does, his sentience and worth are quickly apparent to Manny, Wyoming, and de la Paz, and they help him become the secret figurehead of a libertarian revolution – or vice versa.

Realistic Luna: The gravity is light, but if you stick around too long, you’ll have to stay, and that means underground. It’s great for growing wheat underground, though, and given its orbit over a gravity well, it’s cheap to catapult that wheat back to Earth – and, accordingly, easier for the Moon to hurl rocks at Earth than vice versa, which ultimately allows for their independence. de la Paz manipulates an Earth company into developing a horizontal rail launcher many kilometers long in India that will eventually be able to duplicate this ease (why haven’t we built this yet IRL, by the way?)

Anachronisms: As wildly creative as Heinlein was, the limits of writing science fiction in 1965 are apparent. Fusion reactors seem to exist, but Manny’s extended family only has one “line” installed for communication purposes (it can handle video, though). Mike is an extremely powerful and sentient AI, but no other computing devices seem to exist, handheld, laptop, refrigerator-sized or otherwise – much less an internet or even intranet. Luna is able to bombard Earth with impunity, suggesting no extraterrestrial missile defenses were ever invented (we could shoot down satellites in the 1980s).

Closing thoughts. Mistress is one of his best, and I like reading Heinlein, but had I ever met him, I probably would have found him as insufferable as Ayn Rand. His books at least allow a slow digestion of his ideas without immediate regurgitation. His greatest weaknesses from the hindsight of 2023 are his reliance on author surrogates that act out his apparent harem fantasies and the inevitable expository mansplaining that calls attention to itself.

However, Heinlein was self-aware. Each surrogate is unique. Stranger In A Strange Land‘s Jubal Harshaw is the prime example of brazenness, but it’s also the reverse: Jubal’s incessant bossing and lecturing ultimately do not save him from existential despair and suicide, and he undergoes a Pauline transformation. Tunnel in the Sky‘s Dr. Matson only bookends matters and benefits from being aloof, and his cryptic advice turns out to be not as useful as his wife’s bring-two-knives practicality. In Starship Troopers, Johnny Rico’s Moral Philosophy teacher, Mr. Dubois, only appears in flashback and shares some duties with the present-tense Sergeant Zim, which reinforces how deeply the MI’s values run.

Mistress‘s de la Paz gets an operatic Hero of the Revolution death, which I’ve suspected is as fake as Mike’s, but it tells me that Heinlein knew what he was known for, and delivered it without complaint and with a wink.