Weizenbaum's 1982 New York Times quote extends the Maslow hammer-and-nail line into his own warning that computers narrow what counts as a legitimate problem

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Immediately after invoking the Maslow hammer-and-nail line (see claim-weizenbaum-1982-nyt-hammer-nail-quote-confirmed-tier1-primary), Joseph Weizenbaum extends it, in the same 1982 New York Times passage, into an argument about computers specifically: "To him who has only a computer, the world world [sic — the Times's digitized archive duplicates the word; see audit_status] looks like a computable domain. You introduce a new symbolic system, and one begins to interpret the world in such terms. The danger is that we will end up thinking like a computer and that the only things we will recognize as legitimate problems are those where quantification and calculation play a big role."

The Maslow line functions here as rhetorical setup, not scholarly citation — Weizenbaum uses it to license his own claim that a new tool (the computer) doesn't just solve problems but redefines which problems are recognized as problems at all. The quote sits inside Fiske's wider feature surveying several academics' views on whether computer use changes how people think, alongside quotes from Seymour Papert, Herbert Simon, and Allen Newell (whose name the Times archive renders "Alan Newall") in the same article.

This is a distinct claim from the misattribution question the Maslow line raises: it is about Weizenbaum's own argument, made in his own words, at the same Tier 1 primary. It gives the vault's ELIZA/DOCTOR-era Weizenbaum material (claim-rfc439-parry-doctor-1972-arpanet-conversation) an early, dated instance of the epistemic-narrowing worry that runs through his later, better-known writing on computers and human judgment.