1964. The World's Fair is in NewYorkCity. Charles Eames& Eero Saarinen designed IBM's pavilion to demystify computation—solving a problem with a computer is "an elaboration of human-scale acts," and the solution itself can be less valuable than the insights gained in the process. 
“The Fair? We're There!” wrote the @nytimes, promoting a joint project in the IBM Pavilion. A visitor would write down a date on a card and "watch an electronic Ouija board gobble it up, read the handwriting, and seconds later spell out the banner headline of that day.”
The card had a headline written by an IBM researcher on one side & a detailed explanation of the method used to recognize the handwritten date on the back—a light traced each number in a series of circles, like "children trace letters for penmanship exercises.” Human-scale acts.
Also in 1964, Joseph Wiezenbaum starts ELIZA, an early AI, a human-computer conversation. Corresponding with ELIZA felt to some people like they were talking to a real person and Wiezenbaum wanted to remove ELIZA's magic. "It is said that to explain is to explain away," he wrote.
He said if the inner workings of a program "are explained in language sufficiently plain to induce understanding, its magic crumbles away; it stands revealed as a mere collection of procedures, each quite comprehensible. The observer says to himself ‘I could have written that’.
One last ingredient - IBM and the NYT partnered in 1969 to create "The Information Bank". According to an NYT editorial, "We envision that the instantaneous accessibility of a gigantic store of background information on virtually every subject of human research and inquiry..."
The NYT would open their clipping library or morgue to the public. That meant 20 million articles from The Times & other pubs. The index was “haphazard, inconsistent, inaccurate” and only allowed each article to be filed under a single subject. It grew by 10k clippings each week.
From a 1969 Times Op-Ed - "Today one can transmit a story so fast that the record of an event is instantaneous if not simultaneous with the event itself. The speed and diversity of communications have overwhelmed the world with reportage...."
"... so facilities have had to be devised and techniques developed for handling, storing and retrieving the vast proliferation of current events data to provide a means of bringing some order to the chaos of information and the possibility of reflecting on what it all means..."
"...…[T]he automated information bank… will put the recorded events within instant reach, but it will be up to the human researcher to grasp them." Ambitious! The Times spent over $20M on the project across 14 years, extending its service to libraries and universities.
Some worried that this would make the The Times "an even more powerful arbiter of history than it now is." Weizenbaum went farther (much farther) and declared the Information Bank was, in fact, "destroying history." He wrote...
"The computer has thus begun to be an instrument for the destruction of history…The NYT has already begun to build a “data bank” of curated events. Of course, only those data that are easily deliverable as by-products of typesetting machines are admissible to the system..."
"...As the subscribers to the system grows, and as they learn more and more to rely on “all the news that [was once] fit to print”...how long will it be before what counts as fact is determined by the system,before all other knowledge,all memory, is simply declared illegitimate?"
This set of projects are part of a piece we published in @CJR about the ethics, AI & journalism. An early attempt to demystify computing ("human-scale acts") and explain AI, the desire to algorithmically organize fast-paced, high volume reporting and concerns over biased data,...
...These are all present today as we look to data & computation as tools to be reported "on" as well as "with." The discussion was easier in 1969,the language more direct, but the issues just as complex. It was fun to acquaint ourselves w these projects - cjr.org/tow_center_rep…
