Why the thoughts of a computer scientist born 100 years ago are so topical
“The Internet is a huge pile of garbage with a few pearls in it,” said computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum. “No data, no action,” said computer pioneer Henry F. Sherwood.
A contradiction? Or an ingenious pair of thoughts?
Two things are interesting: the statements date back to the 1970s. And the quoted men were brothers, born in Berlin and emigrated with their family to the USA before the Nazis, where they both entered the IT industry.
The computer scientist Weizenbaum (1923-2008) taught as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until his retirement and warned of the dangers of digital practice even then: in 1976 he wrote the book “The Power of Computers and the Powerlessness of Reason”.
In the 1970s, Sherwood (1921 to 2005) founded a company that tested the security of data centers and IT installations.
Weizenbaum: Anniversary year for a critical mastermind
So both brothers recognized the opportunities and challenges of digitalization decades ago, and you could say that none of this is a thing of the past – on the contrary. The city of Potsdam is currently struggling, once again, with the massive impact of a cyber attack on its administration. What went wrong here?
It is fitting that the Berlin Weizenbaum Institute is celebrating the year 2023, the 100th anniversary of Joseph Weizenbaum’s birth. The company has designated the year in which the critical pioneer of the digital society will be commemorated. (You can attend the ceremony live on January 10 here).
Safety first, even in UVA
This is also an important topic for us as a modern digital agency. Despite our passion for new tools and efficiency, security and the responsible handling of data are paramount in our work.
The first chatbot was called Eliza
Of course, Weizenbaum himself, who died in 2008 in a village in Brandenburg, also drove the development of today’s digital world with many an invention, albeit sometimes involuntarily.
In the 1960s, he built the artificial psychotherapist “Eliza”, who was able to conduct a simple therapy session. The test subjects were extremely satisfied – and Weizenbaum was worried: it was just for fun, he said, he had only wanted to demonstrate the machine’s limited communication capabilities.
But the development of AI was unstoppable. When you encounter a chatbot today, there’s always a bit of “Eliza” in it.
