Wired magazine writing about the history of computing and how it relates to our current moment, continues to astound. And i have a personal link to this history.
https://www.wired.com/story/inventing-eliza-book-excerpt-chatbot/
This is a terrific story, worth reading. Sorry/not sorry that I may have nudged some of you to subscribe to Wired in order to read the articles I post here.
My take about the article
Weitzenbaum, the inventor of Eliza, a straightforward computer chat-program that mimicked a Rogerian psychologist, launched it in 1950. Humans could sit at a large computer terminal (predating the internet and even dial-up computers) and interact with a program. It would respond in simple sentences, occasionally asking a question, occasionally ‘reflective listening’ by repeating something you told it.
It was a very simple program, and yet many who interacted with it ended up pouring out their hearts to this rudimentary program, and it astounded the inventor Weitzenbaum that such a poor representation of a human, simple reflective listening, could prompt such a reaction from humans.
Eliza and me
I interacted with Eliza at the San Francisco Exploratorium. It might still be there, at the very very back of the enormous warehouse-sized science museum. You can walk up and type to it and it will talk you as much as you have patience for. By current ChatGPT standards, it is quite terrible, but put yourself back 70 years when a manual typewriter was more common than any computer, and this is an astounding achievement.
I have always remembered Eliza, even before the Chat interface resurfaced, that not only could more advanced tech solve math problems and draw beautiful pictures and animations, that it could mimic human language behavior, much as Eliza did.
And here we are.
Do you want to chat with Eliza?
There is a version of her online here:
Claude and me
Having spent quite a bit of time chatting with Claude, setting up my own folder system in Claude Code and engaging it as a personal assistant of sorts, I can feel my own brain changing. How will I interact with it to expand my capability? How will it contract how hard I think, and on what topics? I have imbued it with personality and I have grown to “trust” it to keep track of my work.
I find it useful to spin off part of my brain to look back and myself and consider how I am doing, what I am doing, and how I feel about it. Do you do this? It is fascinating and horrifying.
When I do spend some time pausing to think about my thinking, I find it: confusing, hilarious, worrisome, puzzling, and wondrous. On top of being fascinated with my own thinking, I look at how my brain interacts with the Claude AI. Then I grow fascinated that that such an entity as Claude exists and that I can, for $20 a month, interact with it in this way, and that it is growing with me as my grow my own skills at interacting with it.
Informaticist’s Take? I am both deeply unsettled by these capabilities and also excited about what might come next. At the same time. What do you think? What are you doing with Claude and its friends?
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