Joseph Weizenbaum | The Broomstick Brief

Why professionals rarely start with 'what's needed' before choosing technology

In one corner, we have Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, telling The Guardian in 2024 that AI will be “10 times bigger than the Industrial Revolution.” Disruption is inevitable, he says, but humanity will adapt, as it always does. The challenge is simply to manage the turbulence. In the other corner, we have Joseph Weiz…

A hungry child sitting at a school desk made of circuit boards and screens, looking confused and isolated amid a background of headlines about poverty, underfunded schools, and rising military budgets

Thirty years of not listening to Joseph Weizenbaum

In 1991, The Tech at MIT published an interview with Joseph Weizenbaum, the computer scientist best known for creating ELIZA and later becoming one of the field’s sharpest internal critics. Speaking with Diana ben‑Aaron, he dissected the role of computers in education, their entanglement with the military, and the ethi…