iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Open on Bluesky →

Replies

Jess Hagman @hagman.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

LOL. From 1995.

Media accounts in the United States usually describe the value of current technologies in terms of their potential capabili-ties. They often exaggerate their level of development, the quality of product engineering, and the extent to which they have been adopted. They have also exaggerated the attributes of the few commercial applications that do exist by suggesting that these systems
"think" like people rather than simply performing the symbolic manipulations on formal representations of the tasks usually performed by people. The American press often promotes Al in sensationalist terms (cf. "Artificial Intelligence Is Here," 1984; Apple-gate and Day 1984). A representative example appeared on the cover of the February 15, 1988 issue of Insight on the News. It heralded its cover story about AI with: "See machines think. Think, machine, think. The world of artificial intelligence." More accurate stories sometimes appear in magazines and newspapers, but they are less common than the sensationalized stories. Despite sensational claims in the press, none of the higher performance AI systems, with the exception of a particular checkers-playing pro-gram, has "learned" to modify its behavior, let alone learn "the way that humans do."

Jess Hagman @hagman.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

From Rob Kling and C. Suzanne Iacono "Computerization movements and the mobilization of support for computerization." Ecologies of Knowledge: Work and Politics in Science and Technology. Ed by Susan Leigh Star.

000