PERSON
Joseph Weizenbaum
MIT computer scientist; author of ELIZA (1966). Among the earliest to identify the phenomenon of humans projecting meaning onto computers. His later book *Computer Power and Human Reason* (1976) argued for careful distinctions between domains where machines should and should not replace human judgement, and is still read as a founding work of AI ethics.
Profile
- Born
- 1923
- Died
- 2008
- Span
- 85 years
- Appearances
- 01
- Name
- ENJoseph WeizenbaumJAジョセフ・ワイゼンバウム
Appearances
- 1966ELIZA — The First Conversational ProgramJoseph Weizenbaum at MIT built ELIZA, a natural-language conversation program. Its most famous script, 'DOCTOR', imitated a Rogerian psychotherapist by reflecting user input back as questions through simple pattern-matching. Many subjects in early sessions reported feeling that the machine 'understood' them—an effect Weizenbaum found unsettling enough that he later wrote *Computer Power and Human Reason* (1976) in part to caution against it.