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From: blenko@burdvax.UUCP (Tom Blenko)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: AI and the Arms Race
Message-ID: <2888@burdvax.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 3-Dec-86 19:16:44 EST
Article-I.D.: burdvax.2888
Posted: Wed Dec  3 19:16:44 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 5-Dec-86 03:17:01 EST
References: <LIN.12253338541.BABYL@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU> <8611181719.AA00510@watdcsu.uucp> <2862@burdvax.UUCP> <863@tekchips.UUCP>
Reply-To: blenko@burdvax.UUCP (Tom Blenko)
Organization: System Development Corp., Paoli, PA
Lines: 59
Keywords: weizenbaum arms race ethics

In article <863@tekchips.UUCP> willc@tekchips.UUCP (Will Clinger) writes:
|In article <2862@burdvax.UUCP> blenko@burdvax.UUCP (Tom Blenko) writes:
|>If Weizenbaum or anyone else thinks he or she can succeeded in weighing
|>possible good and bad applications, I think he is mistaken. Wildly
|>mistaken.
|>
|>Why does Weizenbaum think technologists are, even within the bounds of
|>conventional wisdom, competent to make such judgements in the first
|>place?
|
|Is this supposed to mean that professors of moral philosophy are the only
|people who should make moral judgments?  Or is it supposed to mean that
|we should trust the theologians to choose for us?  Or that we should leave
|all such matters to the politicians?

Not at all. You and I apparently agree that everyone does, willingly or
not, decide what they will do (not everyone would agree with even
that). I claim that they are simply unable to decide on the basis of
knowing what the good and bad consequences of introducing a technology
will be. And I am claiming that technologists, by and large, are less
competent than they might be by virtue of their ignorance of the
criteria professors of moral philosophy, theologians, nuclear plant
designers, and politicians bring to bear on such decisions.

I propose that most technologists decide, explicitly or implicitly,
that they will ride with the status quo, believing that

	1) there are processes by which errant behavior on the part of
	   political or military leaders is corrected;
	2) they may subsequently have the option of taking a
	   different role in deciding how the technology will be used;
	3) the status quo is what they are most knowledgeable about,
	   and other options are difficult to evaluate;
	4) there is always a finite likelihood that a decision may,
	   in retrospect, prove wrong, even though it was the best
	   choice available to them as decision-maker.

Such a decision is not that some set of consequences is, on balance,
good or bad, but that there is a process by which one may hope to
minimize catastrophic consequences of an imperfect, forced-choice
decision-making process.

|Representative democracy imposes upon citizens a responsibility for
|judging moral choices made by the leaders they elect.  It seems to me
|that anyone presumed to be capable of judging others' moral choices
|should be presumed capable of making their own.
|
|It also seems to me that responsibility for judging the likely outcome
|of one's actions is not a thing that humans can evade, and I applaud
|Weizenbaum for pointing out that scientists and engineers bear this
|responsibility as much as anyone else.

I think the exhortations attributed to Weizenbaum are shallow and
simplistic. If one persuades oneself that one is doing what Weizenbaum
proposes, one simply defers the more difficult task of modifying one's
decision-making as further information/experience becomes available
(e.g., by revising a belief set such as that above).

	Tom