Joseph Weizenbaum
1966 · Communications of the ACM
ELIZA is a program operating within the MAC time-sharing system at MIT which makes certain kinds of natural language conversation between man and computer possible. Input sentences are analyzed on the basis of decomposition rules which are triggered by key words appearing in the input text. Responses are generated by reassembly rules associated with selected decomposition rules. The fundamental technical problems with which ELIZA is concerned are: (1) the identification of key words, (2) the discovery of minimal context, (3) the choice of appropriate transformations, (4) generation of responses in the absence of key words, and (5) the provision of an editing capability for ELIZA “scripts”. A discussion of some psychological issues relevant to the ELIZA approach as well as of future developments concludes the paper.
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Jopsph Weizenbaum's ELIZA was rule-based and ran on even slower (1960s) hardware, but because it relied on simple pattern matching instead of neural nets, it would easily have been more responsive (the Emacs editor/operating system has an implementation included, start it with: M-x doctor RETURN). ELIZA was not written in assembler, but (different versions) in COMIT, FORTRAN and LISP. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/365153.365168
The original paper by Weizenbaum is a blast to read. The sample interaction with ELIZA is genuinely humorous. He also makes a number of observations that sound like precursors to societal issues today, such as how humans may perceive human-like machines, and whether it matters if humans can even recognize the non-humans among us. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/365153.365168
Don't overlook books that are critical of engineering as it is often practiced and how it fits into our society: Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum (1976). Weizenbaum wrote Eliza, the first AI chatbot, almost sixty years ago and was appalled at the reception. This book is still very pertinent, especially the Introduction, Chapter 1 On Tools, chapter 9, Incomprehensible Programs, and chapter 10, Against the Imperialism of Instrumental Reason. Chapter 4, Science and the Compulsive Programmer, is one of the first written accounts of the hacker culture. Weizenbaum's original paper on Eliza (1966) [0] is still very pertinent to the present generation of…
chatbots, especially the introduction and discussion. Tools for Conviviality, Ivan Illich (1973) [1]. Influenced recent work by the computer scientists Steven Kell [2],[3] and Kartik Agaram [4]. Computation and Human Experience, Phil Agre (1997) (excerpt at [5]). Agre got a PhD in AI at MIT in the 80s and 90s and became very critical of the field. I think his shorter writings [6][7] are a better introduction, especially the personal memoir at [6]: "about how I became (relatively speaking, and in a small way) a better person through philosophy." 0. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365153.365168 1. http://akkartik.name/illich.pdf 2. https://www.humprog.org/~stephen//research/talks/kell19de-es... 3. https://www.humprog.org/~stephen//research/talks/kell19softw... 4. http://akkartik.name/akkartik-convivial-20200607.pdf 5. https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/che-intro.html 6. https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/notes/00-7-12.html 7. https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/critical.html
Here is the pointer to the original Eliza paper https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365153.365168 Note that Weizenbaum was an AI critic: Weizenbaum's intention was not for Eliza to pass the Turing test, but to show to people that a clearly not intelligent program based on primitive pattern matching can appear to behave intelligently. He failed: His own secretary wanted to be left alone with the software and typed in her personal problems. Work on Eliza (1963-65, paper published 1966) until today is mostly misunderstood.
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