RIP Joseph Weizenbaum
by DanIf you’ve ever used a bot like SmarterChild, pause and pay a moment of respect to the late Joseph Weizenbaum who died March 5, the news of which is only now making the rounds. Weizenbaum was the creator (in 1966) of ELIZA (play with the web simulation), the first software program whose purpose was to make the computer seem like a human being, with human-like responses. ELIZA was (and remains) ridiculously seminal in HCI circles, and its influence can be seen in everything from IM to text-based adventure games to Clippy.
Weizenbaum had some wrong-headed, disparaging things to say about the internet (”a garbage dump”), but his caution about the possible evils of computers sounds like he was warning us about SkyNet long before anyone else was. He had a great concern with the ethics of technology and strongly advocated that computers never replace human decision-making.
Another one of the old guard is gone, and we are all lessened for it.
This entry was posted
on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Interaction Design, People you should know about.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.