and Isaac Newton was an alchemist as well as a physicist and mathematician, but we have lost his alchemical works and kept his mathematical ones. i am saying that that Weizenbaum's opinions on artificial intelligence have more affinity to Isaac Newton's on the Great Work than to the calculus.
in fairness newton's alchemy is very aesthetic
Had an idea for a novel I never got around to that started with Newton’s corpse disappearing on the eve of his 400th birthday and ended up entangling four separate timelines generated by the cross product of [Newton’s physics works, it doesn’t] X [Newton’s alchemy works, it doesn’t]
Keynes thought so :)
That may be the case, but so are the opinions of the AI safety crank club.
i think that this is very much the case!
Sure, writing a preface to Steiner is crank central, but what bearing does this have on Weizenbaum's distinction between judgment and calculation? This guilt-by-association criticism is every bit as ideological as the one put forward by Bender and co.
The problem of where to draw the boundary between judgment and calculation is a political problem, not an engineering one. bsky.app/profile/mrag...
This has nothing to do with whatever beliefs Weizenbaum may have had regarding humans' direct psychic access to the Akashic records or whatever.
I personally prefer Philip Agre’s _Computation and Human Experience_. I don’t think he could be accused of being a crank.
As for Newton, he had enough epistemic humility to refrain from making hypotheses about the mechanism behind action at a distance.