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From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: does AI kill?
Message-ID: <5901@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 19 Jul 88 00:36:35 GMT
References: <1376@daisy.UUCP> <143100002@occrsh.ATT.COM>
Sender: news@venera.isi.edu
Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu.UUCP (Stephen Smoliar)
Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute
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In article <143100002@occrsh.ATT.COM> tas@occrsh.ATT.COM writes:
>
>	Lets face it, I am sure ultimately it will be easier to place the
>	blame on a computer program (and thus on the supplier) than on a
>	single individual.  Isn't that kind of the way things work, or am
>	I being cynical?
>
If you want to consider "the way things work," then I suppose we have to
go back to the whole issue of blame which is developed in what we choose
to call our civilization.  We all-too-humans are not happy with complicated
answers, particularly when they are trying to explain something bad.  We
like our answers to be simple, and we like any evil to be explained in
terms of some single cause which can usually be attributed to a single
individual.  This excuse for rational thought probably reached its nadir
of absurdity with the formulation of the doctrine of original sin and the
principle assignment of blame to the first woman.  Earlier societies realized
that it was easier to lay all blame on some dispensible animal (hence, the
term scapegoat) than to pick on any human . . . particularly when any one
man or woman might just as likely be the subject of blame as any other.
Artificial intelligence has now given us a new scapegoat.  We, as a society,
can spare ourselves all the detailed and intricate thought which goes into
understanding how a plane full of innocent people can be brought to a fiery
ruin by dismissing the whole affair as a computer error.  J. Preser Eckert,
who gave the world both Eniac and Univac, used to say that man was capable
of going to extraordinary lengths just to avoid thinking.  When it comes to
thinking about disasterous mistakes, the Aegis disaster has demonstrated, if
nothing else, just how right Eckert was.