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Introduction.What was going on at Xerox in 1987? I had just come back from a vacation to the Pacific Northwest and one of the last stops was with a friend from my high school who was working as a receptionist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and was friends with researchers who were excited about A.I. and about their work digitizing the world so that computers could be employed answering life’s questions. When talking with these very smart fellows my mind immediately thought about Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s problem of humans not understanding the answer given by the ultimate computer. I said something to them about it being well and good that they “convert” everything to binary code, but what if we don’t understand the answer? That was probably the inspiration behind the following story, and it being the 1980s I had to slap in some reference to Edwin Meese. Enjoy. 2024-02-29

ADI Story: Xerox Discovers How Humans Think

August-December 1987 ADI Vol. 1, Issue 3. At a Tuesday morning press conference Computer Research scientists from Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) announced that they had made a significant step toward understanding how the human brain works. 

2008-01-20 Computer History Museum by Joe Bustillos

Before the recent breakthrough scientists tried to duplicate the human thought processes using computers or Artificial Intelligence (Al). But scientists were perplexed by the test result they received when they gave a series of questions to computers that had an average human’s level of “intelligence.” The computers never came up with the same answers as those given by the humans. 

“We were obviously missing some hidden factor In the algorithm that we were using,” Chief research scientist, Sarah Bellum said. 

“We discovered the missing factor when we realized that the reason the computers’ answers didn’t match the humans’ answers was because the humans were wrong 99.9 percent of the time,” said Bellum. 

Bellum and staff immediately began implementing their new discovery, Artificial Stupidity (AS), on a computer system specifically designed for the purpose, the Artificial Stupidity System (A-). The A- uses a special hand-held input device, the Meese, that is based on technology used in current Apple and IBM computers to make selections from on-screen menus. But the Meese, according to Bellum, is more than a simple pointing device. 

One of the two special functions of the Meese is to take the selected input and draw the wrong conclusions. 

“Say, for example, we give the A- data regarding all of the sexually explicit material published in the US during the past decade. The Meese is likely to draw a direct ’cause and effect’ relationship between the sexually explicit material and the increase in violence in the US. It’s really quite life-like in its use of syllogisms,” Bellum said. 

The second special function of the Meese is to withhold essential information from the computer’s brains, its Central Processing Unit (CPU). 

“We have just begun to run experiments with this last function,” Bellum said. “But it seems that the device, because it happens to be between the data and the CPU, as any input device would be, makes the fallacious assumption that it has the intelligence to decide what information should get to the CPU and what information shouldn’t,” Bellum said. 

“This feature might be too life-like for our purposes,” Bellum concluded. [ADI] 

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