1923–2008 · computer scientist, MIT

eizenbaum wrote one of the most famous programs in the history of computing, and then spent much of the rest of his life warning people about the reaction to it.

life

He was born in Berlin. His family left Germany in 1936 and settled in the United States. After studying mathematics at Wayne State University he worked in industry, including on an early banking computer system at General Electric, and joined MIT in 1963.

what he did

ELIZA, described in (Weizenbaum, 1966), matched keywords in what a person typed and transformed their sentences by simple rules. Its best-known script, DOCTOR, played a non-directive psychotherapist, which let it turn almost anything back into a question. Weizenbaum chose that role because it excused the program from knowing anything about the world.

What troubled him was how people responded. In Computer Power and Human Reason (Weizenbaum, 1976) he described people who knew how the program worked forming an emotional connection with it, and recounted that his own secretary asked him to leave the room so she could talk to it in private [paraphrase, not a quotation]. The book argued that some decisions should not be handed to computers even if computers could make them, because they require judgment and responsibility that belong to people.

why he is here

The ELIZA effect is named after his program, and the questions he raised are the core of anthropomorphism and sycophancy research. You can try a version of ELIZA on our minds page.

Primary works and sources

1. Weizenbaum (1966). ELIZA—A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine. Communications of the ACM. doi:10.1145/365153.365168
2. Weizenbaum (1976). Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.

see also

	minds — talk to ELIZA
	anthropomorphism
	essay: the polite machine — ELIZA reflected; modern models agree
	timeline: machines that answer — 1966, and PARRY in 1972