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Mechanical Intelligence and Counterfeit Humanity
Reflections on six decades of relations with computers
A misplaced comma might turn a meaningful question into gibberish, and, as cybernetician Norbert Wiener, Ph.D. 1913, put it, “The agencies of magic are literal-minded.” Users of batch-processing systems learned, like the Arabian Nights fisherman who released the genie from the jar, to be very careful what they asked for. Named after the reprogrammed flower girl of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion(later the basis for the musical My Fair Lady), ELIZA crudely mimicked a psychiatrist who knew only how to twist the patient’s statements into new questions and nothing of the meaning of the words it was rearranging. We learn from the feel of an embrace and taste of ice cream, from battle wounds and wedding ceremonies and athletic defeats, from bee stings and dog licks, from watching sunsets and riding roller coasters and reading Keats aloud and listening to Mozart alone.
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