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

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (3 children)

From McCarthy's reply:

My current answer to the question of when machines will reach human-level intelligence is that a precise calculation shows that we are between 1.7 and 3.1 Einsteins and .3 Manhattan Projects away from the goal.

omg this statement sounds 100% like something that could be posted today by Sam Altman on X. It's hititing exactly the sweet spot between appearing precise but also super vague, like Altman's "a few thousand days".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

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!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's sarcasm. The question asks for unwarranted precision and the response is a joke.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Imagining a guy who asks me a dumb question so I can let everyone know how I'd mock them with a joke answer.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

“Pray tell mr Babbage..”

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Spot on, yeah. Although as pointed out just above, this wasn't actually Weizenbaum's position. But in an era of letters to the editor, perhaps using a little rhetorical trickery to preempt a two-month-long back and forth might be excusable. It's a strawman nonetheless; but this letter is a screed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

That sentence is somewhere between exactly 420.69 and 1,337.00 millialtmans of cringe.