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dgerard@awful.systems

1970s AI bros (incl McCarthy) whining about the inventor of ELIZA telling them to gfy (dl.acm.org)

submitted 3 days ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That paragraph begins,

Like his predecessor critics of artificial intelligence, Taube, Dreyfus and Lighthill, Weizenbaum is impatient, implying that if the problem hasn't been solved in twenty years, it is lime to give up.

Weizenbaum replies,

I do not say and I do not believe that "if the problem hasn't been solved in twenty years, we should give up". I say (p. 198) " . . . it would be wrong . . . to make impossibility arguments about what computers can do entirely on the grounds of our present ignorance". That is quite the opposite of what McCarthy charges me with saying.

It's a snidely jokey response to an argument that Weizenbaum didn't make!

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 6 points 2 days ago

And even if Joseph Weizenbaum did actually say, verbatim: “if the problem hasn’t been solved in twenty years, it is time to give up”, that's not the same as asking for the precise time when “machines will reach human-level intelligence”.