{"id":1601,"date":"2008-05-21T06:43:06","date_gmt":"2008-05-21T05:43:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1601"},"modified":"2008-05-21T06:41:42","modified_gmt":"2008-05-21T05:41:42","slug":"more-weizenbaum-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1601","title":{"rendered":"More Weizenbaum"},"content":{"rendered":"\t

The prescience of Joe Weizenbaum<\/a> continues. After long detours, I have returned to the end of his book, where he is asking whether the world has any understanding of what computers will do. He saw very clearly how a “system” would grow which had its own logic, and in front of which everyone seemed to stand powerless. What set off this riff was the production of an early seismology database, which made it possible to visualise 8000 known earthquakes, and so see the world’s tectonic plates but simultaneously wiped from the map everything that had happened before 1960, because the earlier data was too difficult to scan in.<\/p>\n\n\t

The computer has thus begun to be an instrument for the destruction of history. For when society legitimates only those “data” that are “in one standard format” and that “can easily be told to the machine,” then history, memory itself, is annihilated. The New York Times has already begun to build a “data bank” of current events. Of course, only those data that are easily derivable as by-products of typesetting machines are admissable to the system. As the number of subscribers to this system grows, and as they learn more and more to rely on “all the news that [was once] fit to print,” as the Times proudly identifies its editorial policy, how long will it be before what counts as fact is determined by the system, before all other knowledge, all memory, is simply declared illegitimate? Soon a supersystem will be built, based on the New York Times’ data bank (or one very like it), from which “historians” will make inferences about what “really” happened, about who is connected to whom, and about the “real” logic of events. There are many people now who see nothing wrong in this.<\/blockquote>
\nThis was written in 1975 or a little earlier.<\/p>\n ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\t

The prescience of Joe Weizenbaum continues. After long detours, I have returned to the end of his book, where he is asking whether the world has any understanding of what computers will do. He saw very clearly how a “system” … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n ","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}