I just finished reading an online article from the Web site for The New York Times with the following headline: “Bill Gates Warns A.I. Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit.” The author was Karen Weise, described in the header to the article as having “covered Microsoft since 2018.” The substance was the result of her conversation with Gates, which took place last week.
Some readers may know by now that, as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I first had a desk at the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory in my junior year. I wrote both my senior thesis and my doctoral dissertation under the support of Professor Marvin Minsky, one of the “founding fathers” of AI and author of “Steps toward artificial intelligence, “ published in the January, 1961 issue of the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers. As the old joke goes, if Minsky, who died in January of 2016, read Weise’s article, he would turn over in his grave!
I would like to take as a point of departure what I feel is a critical sentence in Weise’s article: “Mr. Gates conceded that he also might be a flawed messenger simply because of his vast wealth and history as Microsoft’s aggressive chief executive.” Indeed, Gates is definitely a “flawed messenger;” but the reason is that neither he nor Microsoft has ever been an authoritative source for any of the “steps toward artificial intelligence” in Minsky’s article. Indeed, I have to wonder whether or not Gates knew very much about MInsky (or even if he knew or met him at all).
Weise goes on the say that Gates was “stunned” by ChatGPT. To be fair, I would guess that few, if any, readers know very much about the origin of this software. That origin took place in the mid-Sixties, when Joseph Weizenbaum created a “chat” program called ELIZA. As Weizenbaum’s Wikipedia page puts it, the program, named DOCTOR, “was capable of engaging humans in a conversation which bore a striking resemblance to one with an empathetic psychologist.”
Anyone visiting the AI Lab was probably introduced to ELIZA. My own favorite story took place when the Merce Cunningham Dance Company visited Boston. By that time I had written a generous number of articles about that company, including a performance-by-performance account of a winter season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which appeared in Ballet Review. During the Boston visit, the stage director accepted my invitation to visit the AI Lab, and one of the dancers, Sandra Neels, joined him for that visit. Since I know that she would not be interested in “technical talk,” I sat her down at a workstation that was connected to ELIZA. After the “business” part of the visit was concluded, she was still typing away. When I asked her what she thought about it, she replied, “It’s like talking to Merce!”
I suppose it would be somewhat brash to suggest that a Cunningham dancer knew more about artificial intelligence that Gates does. Nevertheless, I have to wonder just how much Gates knows about how that discipline came to be and how it has advanced over the course of over half a century! Mind you, I am all for writing about artificial intelligence; but I am afraid that Weise has not yet established herself as an “informed source!”
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