On AI Aliens

“Humans and computers belong to separate and incommensurable realms... For Weizenbaum, we cannot humanise AI because AI is irreducibly non-human. What you can do, however, is not make computers do (or mean) too much. We should never ‘substitute a computer system for a human function that involves interpersonal respect, understanding and love,’ he wrote in Computer Power and Human Reason. Living well with computers would mean putting them in their proper place: as aides to calculation, never judgment. Weizenbaum never ruled out the possibility that intelligence could someday develop in a computer. But if it did, he told the writer Daniel Crevier in 1991, it would ‘be at least as different as the intelligence of a dolphin is to that of a human being.’ There is a possible future hiding here that is neither an echo chamber filled with racist parrots nor the Hollywood dystopia of Skynet. It is a future in which we form a relationship with AI as we would with another species: awkwardly, across great distances, but with the potential for some rewarding moments. Dolphins would make bad judges and terrible shrinks. But they might make for interesting friends.”

Ben Tarnoff, “A Certain Danger Lurks There”: How the Inventor of the First Chatbot Turned against AI.” - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/25/joseph-weizenbaum-inventor-eliza-chatbot-turned-against-artificial-intelligence-ai.