Joseph Weizenbaum

Yet there were, as ever, skeptics.

Joseph Weizenbaum, an MIT engineer who in 1966 had developed ELIZA, the first of what would come to be called a chatbot, objected to the development of artificial intelligence as leading inevitably to the automation of the functions of the state.

Writing in 1976, he described as obscene any project that proposed to substitute a computer system for a human function that involves interpersonal respect, understanding, and love.

He also warned against research that would one day result in a fully automated battlefield.

You know, you would sit and talk to it, and it would just mirror what you were saying back at you.

And the guy who created it, this professor there, Joseph Weizenbaum, the thing he found most unnerving was that he would sit people in front of ELIZA and have them talk to it, and he talks about how his secretary at one point asked him to leave the room, and he asked her why, and she said, "I wanna have a conversation with it." And he just like he, he ends up writing later, he couldn't believe how this, again, quite crap chatbot-

[laughs]

... could, I think his words were, "evoke powerful delusions in otherwise normal people".

It was an impressive feat of programming, but just a collection of key words that related to the words written to the phrases in the database.

Eliza's author, Joseph Weizenbaum, then a young computer science professor at MIT, would have agreed with Lambda.

He had written the script for Eliza mainly as a way to show what computers were capable of to people who were clueless about computers.

It didn't take very long, however, before he realized that many people were very much overestimating those capabilities.

His time at MIT grew unpleasant.

At the birthplace and epicenter of the cognitive revolution, the beating heart of artificial intelligence, no one would even eat lunch with him.

No one, aside from Joseph Weizenbaum, the father of Eliza, who made it a point to sit with Dreyfus to show their colleagues how juvenile they were.

In 1968, Dreyfus left MIT, even though he had tenure.

A technology that almost 60 years in the future would explode into the mainstream, alter the global economy, and raise significant questions about the future.

MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum carries on a dialogue with a computer through a typewriter.

A computer can play many roles depending upon how it's programmed.

I have told the computer that it's to understand what I'm saying, say in the context of being a doctor.

If I then tell the computer, for example, my head hurts, I expect the computer to respond to that as a doctor might.

And it turns out that that man, Joseph Weisenbaum, would also become one of its earliest critics, seeing it as deceptive and playing upon our natural vulnerabilities.

I'm Ian Mont.

This week on Campus Files, Eliza at MIT, the world's first chatbot.

Then, in 1959, the term machine learning was coined when talking about a computer that learned how to play a mean game of checkers.

But then, in 1966, we got Eliza, a natural language conversation program created by Joseph Weizenbaum, the world's first chatbot.

She was an incredibly rudimentary form of AI compared to what we're used to now.

The user would input some line of dialogue, then Eliza would scan the input for key words.

Let's talk a little bit more about the implications of this for computer science education.

Yeah, so we said this in another episode as well, I think the one on Weizenbaum, where I think the most interesting general thought from this book is computers can be bad.

Automization can be bad.

And I think if you study computer science...

You know, I think one of the interesting things about the history of AI is that there's actually a really long story about the research into ethics, social impacts, which is what I do.

Um, the guy who invented Eliza, Joseph Weizenbaum, who I mentioned, he was so kinda taken aback by how much people were taken in by this very simple program that he wrote a whole book in the '70s about things, you know, what computers can do and can't do related to humans.

A- and every, every, you know, every f- you know, decade or so, there's a big upsurge in that work.

What seems to happen, though, is that when a new technical innovation, a new, you know, a new thing, maybe it's the personal computer, maybe it's the internet, maybe it's social media, maybe it's smartphones, maybe it's the, the first wave of AI about 10 years ago, maybe now it's LLMs, when those come in You know, for whatever reason, you know, politicians and the media, you know, they tend to forget there's been all this other research on, on the impacts of these tools, and all of a sudden everything is shiny and new and amazing and great.

It isn't a hunch.

The second, the second thing was there was a professor called Joseph Weizenbaum, uh, and he built something called ELIZA, which was one of the first conversational programs.

It was like a few hundred lines of code.

He actually built it as a reaction at the time to, to the psychology of the era, which was Rogerian.

Yeah.

In fact, the book highlights a quote from the computer scientist, Joseph Weizenbaum, that really sets the stakes for what we're talking about.

He wrote, uh, "The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is responsible."

Creator of universes.