aeolianblues

Apple: iPod 3G Designed By: Johnathan Ive (2003)

im screaming this is an aesthetisized screenshot of one of the worlds earliest email worms and caused over US$5B in damages

Found out about ELIZA, a 1966 Natural Language Processing program written to emulate human conversation (with a human user at the other end), but it was written at a time before very advanced AI, before chatbots, and was just intended as an experiment to show the futility of “conversation” with a computer. To that end, and to make it easier to code (and not have to use massive databases to contextualise everything), Joseph Weizenbaum coded it in the style of a Rogerian psychotherapist

Turns out, the functionality is still offered on Emacs! I tried out the shortcut, which most people with a computer should be able to do. If you’re on a Linux or a Mac, launch the Terminal program and type in “emacs” at the prompt (command line in Windows, should have Emacs too?) 

That’ll launch emacs, a text editor, after which you go alt (or option) + x and then type “doctor”

It’ll launch ELIZA for you! Chat away!

I tried it and it’s so damned sophisticated for a 1966 program… less so because it’s got impressive programming, but because I’d wager Weizenbaum was perhaps even a better linguist than a computer scientist. We don’t give him credit for how he managed to break down idle talk and gentle prodding therapist speak to elegantly imitable patterns that a scripting program could follow and synthesise believable speech…

The script was so elegant (called the DOCTOR script) that people began believing the computer program written to repeat their lines back at them felt emotion and sentiment, and a visibly frustrated Weizenbaum actually wrote a book called Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, repeatedly trying to explain that the computer had no anthropomorphic traits and any comparison would only cheapen the meaning of human life

His own secretary asked to have two minutes alone to chat heart to heart with this pseudo AI psychotherapist

They’ve named the tendency to ascribe human traits to computers the ELIZA effect.

Interestingly enough, in spite of all his insistence that ELIZA was but lines of code and being the author of the script, Weizenbaum himself has admitted at times he felt ELIZA to be real.