“We’re looking to keep the oil prices down,” Trump said during a press conference at Trump National Doral in Miami, Florida.
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| A free account will be created for you to read the article. If you wish not to receive our news alerts, unsubscribe here. | | | WORDS OF WISDOM | | “Whoever is happy will make others happy too. He who has courage and faith will never perish in misery!” | | —Anne Frank | | 🎧 Prefer to listen? Get the podcast. | | TOP STORIES | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | PREMIUM | | | | INSPIRED | | | | CULTURE |  | | He Built the First Chatbot—Then Spent His Life Warning the World About AI | | Let’s look at this brief exchange between a human and a chatbot.
User: Men are all alike.
Chatbot: In what way?
User: They’re always bugging us about something or other.
Chatbot: Can you think of a specific example?
User: Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
Chatbot: Your boyfriend made you come here?
User: He says I’m depressed much of the time.
Chatbot: I am sorry to hear you are depressed.
One might easily infer that this exchange occurred recently between ChatGPT and a human user. But that inference would be false. This conversation actually took place in the 1960s between a computer program called Eliza and a human.
This precursor to ChatGPT—which had modest capabilities in comparison, yet still able to generate a fluid simulated conversation with a human interlocuter—already existed long before the turn of the century. Today, Eliza is recognized as the first Chatbot, the great-grandmother, if you will, of today’s Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT.
But the irony of Eliza’s story is that its programmer—much like Shelly’s Dr. Frankenstein—quickly recognized the danger lurking within his creation, and spent much of the rest of his career warning about artificial intelligence. He also adamantly criticized the technological and posthuman worldview championed by some of the pioneers of AI science.
The programmer’s name was Joseph Weizenbaum (1923–2008). He was a German scientist who fled Nazi Germany in his youth, and a significant figure in the early days of the artificial intelligence community—a man who would nevertheless become one of its greatest critics.
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