AI pioneer shuts down

THE BLOKE WHO penned a program that managed to mimic a Rogerian psychotherapist will not be coming down for breakfast.

MIT Boffin Joseph Weizenbaum, who wrote Eliza in 1966 which enabled a user sitting at an electric typewriter to 'speak' to a shrink, has died.

There is a version of the software here. Basically the program pulled apart the user's questions and printed them back to keep the conversation going. If this was not possible there were a few back up statements such as, 'can you elaborate'.

Some users thought that Eliza had cognative powers and could really talk to them which encouraged them to open their hearts to the computer.

Weizenbaum, however, was not exactly happy that his invention gained such a cult following. The bottom of his universe fell out when he discovered that people really were opening their souls to what was a fairly silly program.

Born in Berlin in 1923, he developed a novel programming system called SLIP (for Symmetric List Processor), which he published in 1963.

According to the Independent, Weizenbaum was quite modest and never quite understood how he came to be appointed to one of the world's top computer science departments. In fact he was fairly certain that, if he had applied as a student, he would never have been admitted.

He used SLIP to write Eliza which was quickly touted as an early example of AI. Weizenbaum thought that this was daft and took the view that, even if it became possible to build truly intelligent machines, (which he doubted) mechanistic reasoning should never be a substitute for human decision-making.

A human didn't just use logic, but emotional and ethical subtleties that could not be codified, he said. µ

L'Inq
The Independent