1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Joseph Weizenbaum

Joseph Weizenbaum Quotes

Joseph Weizenbaum was a German American computer scientist and a professor at MIT. The Weizenbaum Award is named after him. Wikipedia  

✵ 8. January 1923 – 5. March 2008
Joseph Weizenbaum photo
Joseph Weizenbaum: 1   quote 0   likes

Joseph Weizenbaum Quotes

“Our ignorance of brain function is currently so very nearly total that we could not even begin to frame appropriate research strategies. We would stand before the open brain, fancy instruments in hand, roughly as an unschooled labourer might stand before the exposed wiring of a computer: awed perhaps, but surely helpless. A microanalysis of brain functions is, moreover, no more useful for understanding anything about thinking than a corresponding analysis of the pulses flowing through a computer would be for understanding what program the computer is running. Such analyses would simply be at the wrong conceptual level. They might help to decide crucial experiments, but only after such experiments had been designed on the basis of much higher-level (for example, linguistic) theories.”

Joseph Weizenbaum

Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation (1976)

Thinking , Help , Understanding

Similar authors

Herbert A. Simon photo
Herbert A. Simon 58
American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and p…
Werner Heisenberg photo
Werner Heisenberg 42
German theoretical physicist
Hans Bethe photo
Hans Bethe 2
German-American nuclear physicist
Otto Stern photo
Otto Stern 2
German physicist
Erich Maria Remarque photo
Erich Maria Remarque 63
German novelist
Marlene Dietrich photo
Marlene Dietrich 28
German-American actress and singer
Ernst Ruska photo
Ernst Ruska 2
German physicist
Ernst Jünger photo
Ernst Jünger 16
German writer
Hermann Hesse photo
Hermann Hesse 168
German writer
Herta Müller photo
Herta Müller 28
German-Romanian novelist, poet and essayist