Weizenbaum started raising these big, difficult questions at a time when the field of artificial intelligence was still relatively new and mostly filled with optimism. Many researchers dreamed of creating a world where humans and technology merged in new ways. They wanted to create computers that could talk with us, and respond to our needs and desires. Weizenbaum, meanwhile, would take a different path. He’d begin to speak out against the eroding boundary between humans and machines. And he’d eventually break from the artificial intelligentsia, becoming one the first (and loudest) critics of the very technology he helped to build. [...]
In 1950, British mathematician Alan Turing wrote the seminal Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Brian Christian, author of The Most Human Human, notes that this paper was published “at the very beginning of computer science … but Turing is already … seeing ahead into the 21st century and imagining” a world in which people might build a machine that could actually “think.” In the paper, Turing proposed his now-famous “Turing test” in which a person has a conversation with both a human and a robot located in different rooms, and has to figure out which is which. If the robot is convincing, it passes the test. Turing predicted this would eventually happen so consistently that we would speak of machines as being intelligent “without expecting to be contradicted.” [...]
He also may have missed something that Darcy has thought about a lot with Woebot: the idea that humans engage in a kind of play when we interact with chatbots. We’re not necessarily being fooled, we’re just fascinated to see ourselves reflected back in these intelligent machines.
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