AI and Responsibility

People were thinking about “AI” long before 1992, but I doubt they completely envisioned what the technological landscape would look like in 2026. Although, I think a few people had a good idea of what was coming. I wanted to share a couple startling paragraphs from Neil Postman's Book “Technopoly” from 1992. This is an excerpt from Chapter 7, entitled “The Ideology of Machines: Computer Technology.” He is warning against thinking of “machine as human” and, by implication, “human as machine.” Perhaps the most chilling case of how deeply our language is absorbing the “machine as human” metaphor began on November 4, 1988, when the computers around the ARPANET network became sluggish, filled with extraneous data, and then clogged completely. The problem spread fairly quickly to six thousand computers across the United States and overseas. The early hypothesis was that a software program had attached itself to other programs, a situation which is called (in another human-machine metaphor)…