Machines Like Us

Joseph Weizenbaum, who died last month, was one of the computer scientists who changed the way we think. Unfortunately for all of us, he didn't change it in the way he wanted to. His family was driven from Germany by the Nazis in 1936, and by the early 1960s he was a professor at MIT, part of the first wave of brilliant programmers to whom it sometimes seemed that there was nothing that computers could not do. Contemporaries like John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky confidently predicted the emergence of "strong" human-like artificial intelligence (AI). Then, in 1965, Weizenbaum demonstrated artificial stupidity, and the world has never been the same since.