An island of reason in the cyberstream – on the life and thought of Joseph Weizenbaum
The juxtaposition between the potential of technology and its actual manifestation can be rather jarring. Tools that promise to make tasks easier are used to automate people out of their jobs, devices that trumpet their power of connectivity leave their users feeling alienated, and the machines that propel humans to the stars are the cousins of rocket delivery systems that could rain doom upon humanity. In writing about the “paradoxical role” of technology Joseph Weizenbaum captured this disjunction eloquently, noting “Our adventure with science and technology has brought us to the very brink of self-destruction…and also to unprecedented comfort and even self-fulfillment to many of us. Some of us are beginning to think it is not such a fair bargain after all.”[1]
As a computer scientist and longtime professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Joseph Weizenbaum has secured himself a well-deserved place in the annals of computer history for his program ELIZA and for his role in the development of the programming language SLIP. Yet, what sets Weizenbaum apart from his peers and colleagues is not his successes as a computer scientist but in his recognition of the effects that advances in his field were having upon the wider society. From a position wherein he found himself surrounded by people more interested in the technological than the human, Weizenbaum embraced his role as an iconoclastic, even heretical, figure – pushing back against the ideological embrace of technology at its very source.
