In 1966, an MIT professor named Joseph Weizenbaum created the first chatbot. He cast it in the role of a psychotherapist. A user would type a message on an electric typewriter connected to a mainframe. After a moment, the “psychotherapist” would reply.
In September 2021, the criminologist Betsy Stanko went into the Metropolitan police force to work out why they weren’t catching rapists. The previous year, less than 3% of rapes reported to the Met had resulted in charges being brought; in 2021, that percentage almost halved.
In his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed some interesting tendencies in his fellow humans. In one now-famous anecdote, he described his secretary’s early interactions with his program ELIZA, a proto-chatbot he created in 1966. Following a set of rules meant to approximate patient-directed Rogererian psychotherapy, and following a simple script called DOCTOR, the program made quite an impression ...
