[Deathwatch] Joseph Weizenbaum, programmer "Eliza", 85

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

Joseph Weizenbaum, programmer
WAS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE EXPERT
By David Rising and Mark Pratt
03/15/2008

BERLIN - Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer programmer who helped advance
artificial intelligence only to become a critic of the technology later
in his life, has died. He was 85.

Weizenbaum died March 5 of complications from stomach cancer at a
daughter's home in Groeben, just outside the German capital, Miriam
Weizenbaum, one of his four daughters, said Thursday.

Weizenbaum was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
in the mid-1960s when he developed ELIZA - named for Eliza Doolittle,
the heroine of "My Fair Lady" - which became his best-known
contribution to computer programming.

The program allowed a person to "converse" with a computer, using what
the person said to create the computer's reply.

"Weizenbaum was shocked to discover that many users were taking his
program seriously and were opening their hearts to it. The experience
prompted him to think philosophically about the implications of
artificial intelligence, and, later, to become a critic of it," the MIT
newsletter Tech Talk said Wednesday.

In his 1976 book "Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to
Calculation," Weizenbaum suggested it could be both dangerous and
immoral to assume computers could eventually take over any human role.

"No other organism, and certainly no computer, can be made to confront
genuine human problems in human terms," he wrote.

Weizenbaum was born Jan. 8, 1923, in Berlin and fled to the United
States

in 1936 with his Jewish family to escape Nazi persecution, according to
a short 2003 biography published by Magdeburg's Leibniz-Institut fuer
Neurobiologie.

He began studying math at what was then Wayne University in Detroit in
1941, but broke off a year later to join the U.S. Army Air Corps where
he served as a meteorologist.

He joined a General Electric team in 1955 that designed and built the
first computer system dedicated to banking operations.

He held academic appointments at Harvard, Stanford and the University
of Bremen, among others. 

Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary