Parsing Joseph Weizenbaum

I learned of the March 5 death of computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum from a posting on the CPSR e-mail list. CPSR, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, recognized Weizenbaum with their Norbert Wiener Award in 1988. But he was of course best known for creating Eliza, a mid-'60s computer program that conducted natural-language conversations, notably mimicking a psychotherapist's interview with a patient. Eliza was named for the character in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (familiar as the source of the musical My Fair Lady), someone who was similarly taught to impersonate something she was not. Weizenbaum wrote in his 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason, "Eliza created the most remarkable illusion of having understood in the minds of the many people who conversed with it."Weizenbaum did pioneering work in artificial intelligence and, in particular, dating to the '60s, in natural language processing. Computer scientists have now been working on language-understanding systems, which remain of great current interest, for decades. But Weizenbaum had broader concerns. He considered the computer, as represented in Computer Power and Human Reason, in a sense "merely as a vehicle for moving certain ideas that are much more important."

Weizenbaum observed, "the quest for control is inherent in all technology," control of course being based on simplified, measurable, programmable models of reality. He rejected "nothing but" thinking that would equate these reductionist frameworks — "reason... is nothing but reckoning" — with "authentic human experience."

Weizenbaum wrote in his 1976 book,

In this quotation, substitute "Google" for "the New York Times" and "the Web" for the references to the "data bank" system. Weizenbaum foresaw this substitution three decades ago:

While I wouldn't claim that Weizenbaum foresaw a Web populated by user-generated content, the emergence of social media does not detract from a 2008 rendering of his 1976 forecast: to be on-line is to be perceived.

Weizenbaum as a humanist and Weizenbaum as a computer scientist who focused on language technologies developed hand-in-hand. "Human language in actual use is infinitely more problematical than those aspects of it that are amenable to treatment by [Claude Shannon's] information theory... Language involves the histories of those using it, hence the history of society, indeed, of all humanity generally."

Doug Schuler wrote the CPSR list, "According to the EE Times, Joseph Weizenbaum died on March 5. He was a dedicated and compassionate defender of humanity. In terms of technocratic critique he provided important lessons for the generations that followed him. I hope that his wisdom is not entirely lost as the human enterprise moves into the 21st century."I learned of the March 5 death of computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum from a posting on the CPSR e-mail list. Weizenbaum was best known for creating Eliza, a mid-'60s computer program that conducted natural-language conversations, notably mimicking a psychotherapist's interview with a patient. Weizenbaum wrote in his 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason, "Eliza created the most remarkable illusion of having understood in the minds of the many people who conversed with it."