This is what Weizenbaum wrote about the dawn of the computer age: it was used as an excuse to not even try to make society better. The same thing is happening with “AI” now.

We know what would make society better.

One example is UBI (which Weizenbaum mentions in the same book in passing as “negative income tax”).

But of course we don’t have universal healthcare or UBI nor really any other advances (perhaps the ADA was a rare win); instead trillions of dollars are invested into software that tells us to bomb schools; for the sole reason to say it was the computers’ fault, not ours.

This book* was written 50 years ago.

*Computer Power and Human Reason

#AI #society