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Posted by Bill S on March 17, 2008 at 11:03:00 am EDT
In reply to People prefer videogames to the outdoors posted by Bill S on February 5, 2008 at 7:48:13 pm EST

Relevant to the preference and addictiveness of the videogames and the internet over real life, Joseph Weizenbaum, in many ways the father of artificial intelligence and expert systems, died a few days ago. Here is the obit the Wall Street Journal published over the weekend, with many of his thoughts on what he came to consider the Pandora's box he opened.

Joseph Weizenbaum (1923- 2008)
MIT Professor's Work Led Him
To Preach the Evils of Computers
By STEPHEN MILLER
March 15, 2008; Page A6

As author of a computer program called Eliza that was designed to simulate a psychiatrist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Joseph Weizenbaum created a beguiling artifact of early computing. But after test subjects told him the program really empathized with their problems, Mr. Weizenbaum became a digital Jeremiah, and spent decades preaching the computer apocalypse.

The program was in effect a form of a Turing test, named for the computer scientist Alan Turing. In 1950, Turing predicted computers would soon be invented that would appear to think, and said a test of that development would be whether a person could distinguish a computer's dialogue from a human's.

Mr. Weizenbaum, who died March 5 at age 85, modeled Eliza's conversational style on a form of psychology developed by Carl Rogers. It includes open-ended questions that often use the analysand's words:

Young woman: Men are all alike.

Eliza: In what way?

YW: They're always bugging us about something or other.

E: Can you think of a specific example?

YW: Well, my boyfriend made me come here.

E: Your boyfriend made you come here?

YW: He says I'm depressed.

E: I am sorry to hear you are depressed.

YW: It's true, I am unhappy.

Introduced in 1966, the program was so successful that when Mr. Weizenbaum's secretary tested it, she made him leave the room so she could have some privacy.

He named Eliza for Shaw's ingénue in "Pygmalion." But Mr. Weizenbaum soon became convinced that computers were more sinister. In his 1976 book "Computer Power and Human Reason," he argued for a more humanistic computing. "How long will it before what counts as fact is determined by the system, before all other knowledge, all memory, is simply declared illegitimate?" he wrote. His vision was more that of the homicidal computer of "2001" than the genial C-3PO of "Star Wars."

His feelings seemed to stem in part from his experiences growing up in Nazi Germany. After he was expelled from high school for being a Jew, his family immigrated to Detroit in 1936. During World War II, he was an Army meteorologist. He would have been a cryptographer, he said, but "enemy aliens" weren't permitted to do that job.

He later was part of the General Electric Co. team that developed ERMA, the computerized banking system that, among other things, put the blocky numerals on the bottom of checks. An MIT faculty member from 1963, he developed an early programming language called SLIP. If MIT was his "paradise of technology," as he told an interviewer, Eliza would become the serpent in the garden.

He soon soured on computers and condemned automated decision making as antihuman. In a lighter moment, he called them, "a solution looking for a problem." At other times he compared them with National Socialism, Karl Marx and Stalin. Mr. Weizenbaum gave up working on artificial intelligence.

"He was deeply troubled by the fact that it was easy for people to mistake such simple pattern matching for true understanding," says Bruce Buchanan, a University of Pittsburgh computer-science professor who debated artificial intelligence with Mr. Weizenbaum in the 1970s. "He raised questions that are as relevant today as they were when he first raised them."

Even the rise of the Internet, with its seemingly boundless possibilities for communication, failed to impress Mr. Weizenbaum.

"The Internet is like one of those garbage dumps outside of Bombay," he told the New York Times in 1999, three years after he retired to Berlin. "There are people, most unfortunately, crawling all over it, and maybe they find a bit of aluminum, or perhaps something they call sell. But mainly it's garbage."

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