You are now entering the Jewish Currents archive.

January 8: ELIZA

lawrencebush
January 8, 2013
Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer science pioneer who was a child refugee from Nazi Germany, was born in Berlin on this date in 1923. Weizenbaum was best known for his ELIZA program for natural-language processing in computers, which he created in 1966. Named for the character in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (on which My Fair Lady was based), the program enabled computers to engage humans in an empathetic conversation based on the style of psychotherapist Carl Rogers. Weizenbaum was surprised that his program could receive open-hearted responses from human beings, and he began to think philosophically about the implications of artificial intelligence. His 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason, opposed permitting computers to make important decisions about human affairs and drew crucial distinctions between “deciding” and “choosing” and between “calculation” and “judgment.” Weizenbaum was a professor at MIT, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Bremen, and other universities. He died in March, 2008. To read an interesting interview with him, click here. “It is much nicer, it is much more comfortable, to have some device, say the computer, with which to flood the schools, and then to sit back and say, ‘You see, we are doing something about it, we are helping,’ than to confront ugly social realities. . . . I think the computer has from the beginning been a fundamentally conservative force.” —Joseph Weizenbaum