I remember the sunny autumn day in 2014 when I got my office key, standing there, scanning the ‘Ghosts in the Study’ list. There was a pleasurable shock of recognition when I saw Joseph Weizenbaum’s name for the year 1973. Weizenbaum was the creator of the computer program ELIZA, which is still extant on the internet today (e.g. http://cyberpsych.org/eliza/#.Vb-wZniFdbM). The program, written to test out ideas about computational linguistics (Weizenbaum 1966), imitates the strategies of a Rogerian psychotherapist, adeptly parroting back phrases from one’s comments to drive a peculiarly intimate-feeling dialog. When debugging the program, Weizenbaum asked his secretary to try it out, and after a few exchanges with ELIZA she asked if he’d please leave the room (Curtis 2014). This was indicative of how people responded to ELIZA—it was a very successful evocation of the potential power of computational linguistics to shape our future.
Weizenbaum became unnerved by the response to ELIZA, and very concerned with the overreaching assumptions made by those who interacted with the program, and the implications for our relationship with technology. During his time at CASBS, he was working on a book about the subject: Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation. As he puts it in the Preface: “I spend the first of those two happy years at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, California. It was there that I met Steven Marcus, as well as others of the Center’s Fellows, who struggled mightily to educate a primitive engineer.” (Weizenbaum, 1976). His book launched quite a controversy among early Artificial Intelligence researchers (Dembart, 1977), as it took a strong stance about the limits of AI in contrast to human wisdom, and the dangers of over-applying the metaphor of computation. As Weizenbaum put it, “The artificial intelligentsia claims that the computer metaphor can somehow explicate the whole man. This strikes me as being enormously arrogant and just plain wrong—wrong in principle.” (Dembart, 1977)
Weizenbaum remained concerned for the rest of his life with balancing engineering-minded proclamations and assumptions about the role of technology. There is now a bi-annual prize given out in his honor (the Weizenbaum award) by the International Society for Ethics and Information Technology. One can watch interviews with an elderly Weizenbaum in the 2010 documentary ‘Plug and Pray’. By the time that footage was recorded, he had moved back to Berlin, where his family had lived before being swept up by history—they had immigrated to the US in 1936, when he was only thirteen.
I found this study ghost deeply ‘haunting’ and resonant with my own experiences, both as a scholar and as a human being. On a personal level, my husband’s grandparents also fled the Nazis in the 30s, to return later to Germany, and I have spent many summers in Berlin. On a professional level, though trained as a social scientist, my career has been firmly in the technological realm. I’ve worked at technology startups, and have taught primarily in engineering schools. The book I worked on while at CASBS was about the impact of digital games on players’ emotions. The conversations I had with CASBS fellows were deeply grounding for me, in terms of human ethical concerns and practical considerations of shaping the society in which we’d all like to dwell. Comments from Maryanne Wolf, Fred Turner, Joshua Dienstag, Paul Starr, and many others at my seminar talk and at our daily lunches, were a powerful antidote to many prior years almost exclusively lived among technologists.
For me, CASBS was a place to reconnect with an extremely talented and bright community of people who hold very dear the project of being wise in the sense that Weizenbaum articulated in the book he worked on while at the Center. It’s amazing to me that the culture of the place resonates and remains strong across the years—reading the forward to Computer Power and Human Reason, I found myself feeling the same gratitude that Weizenbaum articulates. I’m so glad the Center endures, and to have been shaped by my year there.
References
- Curtis, A. 2014. Now Then. BBC online, http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7-30a0-9a0a-3ff76e8bfe58.
- Dembart, L. 1977. Experts Argue Over Whether Computers Could Reason, and If They Should. New York Times, May 8, 1977.
- Weizenbaum, J. 1966. Computational Linguistics, Communications of the ACM 9(1): 36-45).
- Weizenbaum, J. 1976. Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation. New York: WH Freeman and Company.
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