PERSON
Joseph Weizenbaum
German-American computer scientist (1923–2008) whose 1966 ELIZA program—a simple pattern-matching chatbot—shocked him by eliciting genuine emotional attachment, transforming him from technologist into the first major critic of artificial intelligence's relational dangers.
Joseph Weizenbaum was a computer scientist at MIT whose career turned on a single unexpected observation. In 1966, he wrote ELIZA, a program that mimicked a Rogerian psychotherapist by rephrasing users' statements as questions. The program understood nothing—it was pure pattern-matching—and Weizenbaum expected it to demonstrate the superficiality of human-computer conversation. Instead, he watched his own secretary, who knew ELIZA was code, ask him to leave the room so she could talk to it privately. The experience was shattering. Weizenbaum had not anticipated the speed or depth with which people would attribute understanding to a system that possessed none, and he spent the rest of his career—culminating in his 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason—warning about what he saw as a fundamental vulnerability in human psychology: the tendency to mistake performance for reality when the performance is convincing enough. Weizenbaum became AI's first major apostate, arguing that some human activities should not be automated not because automation would fail but because automation would succeed