In his school's metalworking class, he learned to operate a lathe. The experience brought him out of his brain and into his body. About 70 years later, he looked back on the realisation prompted by this new skill: that intelligence "isn't just in the head but also in the arm, in the wrist, in the hand". Thus, at a young age, two concepts were in place that would later steer his career as a practitioner and critic of AI: on the one hand, an appreciation for the pleasures of abstraction; on the other, a suspicion of those pleasures as escapist, and a related understanding that human intelligence exists in the whole person and not in any one part. In 1941, Weizenbaum enrolled at the local public university.

The tech industry currently holds unprecedented power and influence. Its companies have reached vast market capitalizations, employing hundreds of thousands of workers, and reshaping a range of other industries to accommodate its prerogatives, when it doesn't absorb them outright. Its international political reach is expanding, as companies are intervening in political elections and influencing policy and regulations through millions of dollars spent lobbying. On the academic front, work in tech-related fields such as artificial intelligence and machine learning secures funding with relative ease, its merit and necessity seemingly taken for granted. Directly or indirectly, tech companies continue to invest handsomely in creating an attractive image of the industry, the hackers behind the code, and the technologization of society in general.

Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor emeritus of computer science at MIT who grew skeptical of artificial intelligence after creating a program that made many users feel like they were speaking with an empathic psychologist, died March 5 in Berlin. Weizenbaum, who was Jewish, fled Nazi Germany with his parents and arrived in the United States in the mid-1930s. At the beginning of his career with computers, in the early 1950s, he worked on analog computers; later, he helped design and build a digital computer at Wayne University in Detroit. In 1955, Weizenbaum became a member of the General Electric team that designed and built the first computer system dedicated to banking operations. Among his early technical contributions were the list processing system SLIP and the natural language understanding program ELIZA, which was an important development in artificial intelligence and cemented his role in the folklore of computer science research.

San Francisco: Freeman