![]() ![]() ![]() Maybe if I thought about it 10 minutes longer, I would have come up with a bartender.” The concept needed “conversations in which one of the parties doesn’t have to know everything, and a psychiatrist occurred to me. The idea, he said in 1984, was to have a program that didn’t need a deep reservoir of knowledge. The best way of achieving a conversation between a computer and a human, Weizenbaum believed, was to mimic the repetitive structure of a psychoanalysis session, with the program repeating words and rephrasing statements given to it in the form of a question. To “talk” to a computer at that point usually meant learning a programming language. Later, as a visiting associate professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Weizenbaum began exploring the possibilities of these computers to have English-language interactions with your average person, which was not possible at the time. In 1955, Weizenbaum assisted General Electric in the design of the first computer used for banking. Computers of the time-giant, room-spanning mainframes-were in their infancy but already demonstrating their potential for commercial and educational use. After a stint in the Army Air Corps as a meteorologist, Weizenbaum resumed his formal education and applied his considerable math skills to the burgeoning computer industry. He was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1923, and fled the country with his family in 1935 to escape Nazi rule. At its most sinister, it might make some jobs obsolete while fundamentally altering how users ascribe human traits to machines. ![]() At its most innocuous, ChatGPT is a fun diversion. The chatbot is capable of some impressive feats, from impersonating historical figures to writing surprisingly literate essays. ArnoldReinhold, Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0Īrtificial intelligence, which has dominated the technological conversation for decades, is having a moment thanks to ChatGPT. An IBM 7094 mainframe computer control panel, much like the one ELIZA ran on. ![]()
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