The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo

Author:Joshua Cooper Ramo [Ramo, Joshua Cooper]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2016-05-16T22:00:00+00:00

Patient: Men are all alike.

ELIZA: IN WHAT WAY?

Patient: They’re always bugging us about something or other.

ELIZA: CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE?

Patient: Well, my boyfriend made me come here.

ELIZA: YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE?

Patient: He says I’m depressed much of the time.

ELIZA: I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED.

Patient: It’s true. I am unhappy.

ELIZA: DO YOU THINK COMING HERE WILL HELP YOU TO NOT BE UNHAPPY?

Patient: I need some help, that much seems certain.

Weizenbaum’s program quickly became famous around MIT. (The joke was that it was a better conversationalist than most of the awkward shoe gazers studying at the Cambridge campus.) ELIZA did what Weizenbaum had intended: It gave users a chance to experience what a machine with a mind of its own might feel like. Soon, the program spread to other campuses, to different research institutions, and with every step of its success, Weizenbaum found himself more distressed by the feedback he was receiving. What troubled him was not ELIZA but its users.

One after another, the humans talking with ELIZA became entranced with the computer conversation. They became convinced of the power of the machine to help them. Even professional psychologists wrote to Weizenbaum to say that his miracle machine might one day take over the work of diagnosis and counseling. This felt like a natural next step in the ceaseless progress they were used to in the rest of their lives. Better refrigerators, stronger seat belts, faster jet planes, more plastic—why not a computer doing therapy? It sounded kind of wonderful. “A number of practicing psychiatrists seriously believed the DOCTOR computer program could grow into a nearly completely automatic form of psychotherapy,” Weizenbaum wrote a few years later in his masterpiece Computer Power and Human Reason. He was horrified. Weizenbaum knew that the empathy ELIZA was exuding was faked. It was just code. “I had thought it essential, as a prerequisite to the very possibility that one person might help another cope with his emotional problems, that the helper himself participate in the other’s experience.” He concluded, “science has been gradually converted into a slow-acting poison.”

“Would you mind leaving the room?” Weizenbaum’s secretary said to him once, lost in a particularly personal discussion with ELIZA. “This reaction to ELIZA,” he wrote, “showed me more vividly than anything I had seen hitherto the enormously exaggerated attributions an even well-educated audience is capable of making, even strives to make, to a technology it does not understand.” And this made him nervous. Who, exactly, did understand the technology? Certainly not the users. But all the same, here was his secretary, with only the dimmest idea of how the machine might really work, open to the most intimate sort of discussion with it. Trusting it. The immense power of such machines—and of the people who might control them—rattled Weizenbaum. “The computer programmer,” he concluded in a flash of uneasy insight, “is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver.”

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