He begins to feel that AI as an ideological project is actively harmful, not just too ambitious,

not just a bit unrealistic on what can be achieved, but that it actually has a sinister social

and political dimension.

And that's what he begins to dig into in the course of the 1970s.

Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Ben Tarnoff.

Ben writes about technology and politics.

He is a founding editor of Logic Magazine and the author of Internet for the People,

The Fight for Our Digital Future.

Now, Ben recently wrote an article in The Guardian about Joseph Weisenbaum, who might be a name that you're familiar with,

or maybe it's not, but he was kind of one of the pioneers of AI technology and built this chatbot

called Eliza back in the 1960s that led him to develop a much more critical stance on technology

and artificial intelligence and computers after he created that and saw the

response to it and saw how people kind of related to computers and believed that computers

could have the kind of intelligence that a human could have. Ever since this kind of big boom

and AI hype has happened since the release of chat GPT late last year,

I've been wanting to have a discussion about Joseph Weisenbaum and his work to see how his

critiques and see how his experiences can inform what is going on today and the kind of narratives

and discussions that we're having about AI today,

because I do think that there's a lot that he learned and that he wrote about that is very

informative to this moment. And that has not totally been sideline, like there has been some

writing about it, but largely when we hear, you know, people like Sam Altman and these other

influential folks in the

...