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Showing posts from June, 2021

Still working... another excerpt about the computational metaphor

For decades, the bidirectionality of the Computational Metaphor has caused concern amongst prominent computer scientists, suggesting that treating machines like people can lead to treating people like machines. Joseph Weizenbaum, the developer of the chatbot Eliza, was perhaps the most prominent critic of computer anthropomorphization for this reason (Weizenbaum, 1976) . And Edsger W. Dijkstra, who coined the phrase, “structured programming” also spoke on his concerns about reversing the Computational Metaphor: “A more serious byproduct of the tendency to talk about machines in anthropomorphic terms is the companion phenomenon of talking about people in mechanistic terminology. The critical reading of articles about computer-assisted learning... leaves you no option: in the eyes of their authors, the educational process is simply reduced to a caricature, something like the building up of conditional reflexes. For those educationists, Pavlov’s dog adequately captures the essence of Mank