Cyburbia

[MosMax Hax]

The dangerous idea that's changing how we live and who we are
http://www.cyburbia.tv/
At the annual meeting of political and business leaders at Davos in 2008, a panel was assembled to discuss the potential of "virtual universes" on the net like Second Life. One panellist was Philip Rosedale, the entrepreneur responsible for the imaginary internet world Second Life. To everyone's surprise, however, the debate was monopolised by an eighty-five year old scholar called Joseph Weizenbaum, For most of his professional life Weizenbaum, a computer theorist and former professor at MIT, had warned that our increasing dependence on computers would eventually change the way that we think and communicate, and that – if it wasn't checked – we might end up surrendering human purposes to an electronic machine. In 1966, Weizenbaum had built a computer programme called Eliza which seemed to be capable of making elementary conversation with a human user as if it was a therapist. Eliza was an illusion which worked by simply rephrasing words and repeating them back to the user in the form of a question in an feedback loop The programme was intended to satirise non-directional psychotherapy as well as the dangers of our reliance on electronic machines. Shocked at the popularity of Eliza, a decade later Weizenbaum published a book called "Computer Power and Human Reason" which criticised the whole idea of cybernetics and argued against systems which try to substitute human reason with automated decision-making. The Davos debate was Weizenbaum's to be last major public appearance; he died on 5 March 2008 in Berlin.