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by entriesfull 1056 days ago
From the book, he mentions how quickly people began to anthropomorphize his program ELIZA. His secretary even asked him to leave the room to have a private conversation with it.

He then had an idea to rig the program so that he could be the one responding, but quickly dropped this idea as privacy concerns were raised by his colleagues.

People should be very cautious of giving their power over to machines that are, in the end, programmed by humans that seek power.

2 comments

This is literally the point of the fictional Butlerian Jihad. Computers may appear to do one thing, but ultimately they are propelled into the future by their service to their masters.

Don’t use centralized and closed-source AI.

That, and the part about the gamblers constructing irrational belief systems stuck with me, decades later.