Joseph Weizenbaum (1923–2008) was a German-born American computer scientist considered one of the fathers of modern artificial intelligence. He is famous for building ELIZA, a software program that reacted to users’ responses using simple keyword matching and famously mimicked a psychotherapist.
Born in Berlin, Weizenbaum immigrated with his family to the U.S. in 1936 and settled in Detroit, Michigan. In 1941, Weizenbaum enrolled for mathematics at Wayne University in Detroit, but his studies were interrupted in 1941 for war service with the U.S. Army Air Corps as a meteorologist. He resumed his studies after the war and completed an M.S. in mathematics in 1950.
In 1953, Weizenbaum left Wayne University to work in the nascent computer industry on the West Coast. In 1955 he joined General Electric and became a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1964. There, he set the stage for the advancement of artificial intelligence (A.I.) as the developer ELIZA (1964–65,) named after Eliza Doolittle, who learned proper English in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and My Fair Lady.)
Weizenbaum believed that machines were incapable of duplicating human qualities. He became alarmed at how obsessed some of the users became with interacting with Eliza. He grew skeptical about the potential for technology to improve the human condition, which he outlined in Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (1976.) The book caused discord between Weizenbaum and other members of the artificial intelligence research community.
In 1996, Weizenbaum returned to Germany, where he was a popular speaker known for criticizing computer technology and lecturing about its political and social repercussions.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Joseph Weizenbaum
A computer will do what you tell it to do, but that may be much different from what you had in mind.
—Joseph Weizenbaum
Topics: Computers
I think that children have a power to imagine that is almost magical when compared to the adult imagination, and this is something irrevocable that a child loses when he or she becomes bound by logic. We adults continue to have our children
—Joseph Weizenbaum
Topics: Children
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