Economic, Legal, and Social Implications of Information Technology

Many years ago, MIT's Joe Weizenbaum, frightened by the simple-mindedness with which his Eliza experiments had been misunderstood, expressed serious reservations about artificial intelligence's implicit assumptions and directions. He came to be seen as an adversary of those who had been colleagues, as a whistle-blower, and that particularly dangerous opponent, a convert. Whether or not he intended to, he went out on an academic, intellectual, even spiritual limb. His work has had significant effect on people outside the computing-related disciplines, but is for the most part rejected or ignored by those inside them. The adversarial approach to the social implications of I.T. is not to be recommended, because of the intellectual isolationism it can lead to, and its inherently limited effectiveness.