Buonasera, Il 10/02/2024 13:51, 380° ha scritto: > > > sarebbe interessante quindi comprendere cosa Weizenbaum intendesse con > "scarcity of human intelligence" > Si riferiva a questa considerazione:
Surely finely honed human intelligence is among the scarcest of resources available to modern society. And clearly some problems amenable to scientific investigation are more important than others. Human society is therefore inevitably faced with the task of wisely distributing the scarce resource that is its scientific talent. There simply is a responsibility—it cannot be wished away—to decide which problems are more important or interesting or whatever than others. Every specific society must constantly find ways to meet that responsibility. The question here is how, in an open society, these ways are to be found; are they to be dictated by, say, the military establishment, or are they to be open to debate among citizens and scientists? If they are to be debated, then why are ethics to be excluded from the discussion? And, finally, how can anything sensible emerge unless all first agree that, contrary to what John von Neuman asserted, technological possibilities are not irresistible to man? "Can" does not imply "ought." Unfortunately, the new conformism that permits us to speak of everything except the few simple truths that are written in our hearts and in the holy books of each of man's many religions renders all arguments based on these truths—no matter how well thought out or eloquently constructed—laughable in the eyes of the scientists and technicians to whom they may be addressed. This in itself is probably the most tragic example of how an idea, badly used, turns into its own opposite. Scientists who continue to prattle on about "knowledge for its own sake" in order to exploit that slogan for their self-serving ends have detached science and knowledge from any contact with the real world. A central question of knowedge, once won, is its validation; but what we now see in almost all fields, especially in the branches of computer science we have been discussing, is that the validation of scientific knowledge has been reduced to the display of technological wonders. This can be interpreted in one of only two ways: either the nature to which science is attached consists entirely of raw material to be molded and manipulated as an object; or the knowledge that science has purchased for man is entirely irrelevant to man himself. Science cannot agree that the latter is true, for if it were, science would lose its license to practice. That loss would, of course, entail practical consequence (involving money and all that) which scientists would resist with all their might. If the former is true, then man himself has become an object. There is abundant evidence that this is, in fact, what has happened. But then knowledge too has lost the purity of which scientists boast so much; it has then become an enterprise no more or less important and no more inherently significant than, say, the knowledge of how to lay out an automobile assembly line. Who would want to know that "for its own sake"? Un saluto, Daniela _______________________________________________ nexa mailing list [email protected] https://server-nexa.polito.it/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nexa
