been playing around with a few new social-networking services and have been posting some new entries to my blog. I recently broke down and bought a Blu-ray player with a built-in Wi-fi connection. It lets me stream music from Pandora, movies from NetFlix, and videos from YouTube through my television and stereo. I have to confess: it’s cool. I’m not sure I could live without it.
A Thing Like Me
I t was one of the odder episodes in the history of computer science, yet also one of the more telling. Over the course of a few months in 1964 and 1965, Joseph Weizenbaum, a forty-one-year-old computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote a software application for parsing written language, which he programmed to run on the university’s new time-sharing system. A student, sitting at one of the system’s terminals, would type a sentence into the computer, and Weizenbaum’s program, following a set of simple rules about English grammar, would identify a salient word or phrase in the sentence and analyze the syntactical context in which it was used. The program would then, following another set of rules, transform the sentence into a new sentence that had the appearance of being a response to the original. The computer-generated sentence would appear almost instantly on the student’s terminal, giving the illusion of a conversation.
In a January 1966 paper introducing his program, Weizenbaum provided an example of how it worked. If a person typed the sentence “I am very unhappy these days,” the computer would need only know that the phrase “I am” typically comes before a description of the speaker’s current situation or state of mind. The computer could then recast the sentence into the reply “How long have you been very unhappy these days?” The program worked, Weizenbaum explained, by first applying “a kind of template to the original sentence, one part of which matched the two words ‘I am’ and the remainder [of which] isolated the words ‘very unhappy these days.’” It then used an algorithmic “reassembly kit,” tailored to the template, that included a rule specifying that “any sentence of the form ‘I am BLAH’” should be “transformed to ‘How long have you been BLAH,’ independently of the meaning of BLAH.” 1
Weizenbaum’s application was a product of its time. During the 1950s and ’60s, the enthusiasm for computers, software programming, and artificial intelligence gave rise not only to the idea that the human brain is a type of computer but to the sense that human language is the output of one of the algorithms running inside that computer. As David Golumbia explains in The Cultural Logic of Computation , a new breed of “computational linguists,” led by Weizenbaum’s MIT colleague Noam Chomsky, posited that the form of the “natural language” that people speak and write reflects “the operation of the computer inside the human mind that performs all linguistic operations.” 2 In a 1958 article in the journal Information and Control , Chomsky had written that “one possible method for describing a grammar is in terms of a program for a universal Turing machine.” 3 What made the computationalist theory so compelling was that it came wrapped in a seductive “penumbra of technological newness,” writes Golumbia. It offered a “mechanic clarity,” replacing language’s human “messiness” with “a clean internal computer.” 4 By reverse-engineering the way people talk, you could discover language’s underlying code, which you could then replicate as software.
Weizenbaum named his program ELIZA, after Eliza Doolittle, the cockney flower girl who, in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion , learns to speak proper English under the tutelage of the haughty phonetics professor Henry Higgins. To make the simulated conversations a little more interesting, Weizenbaum also gave his artificial interlocutor a persona—that of a Rogerian
A Thing Like Me
I t was one of the odder episodes in the history of computer science, yet also one of the more telling. Over the course of a few months in 1964 and 1965, Joseph Weizenbaum, a forty-one-year-old computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote a software application for parsing written language, which he programmed to run on the university’s new time-sharing system. A student, sitting at one of the system’s terminals, would type a sentence into the computer, and Weizenbaum’s program, following a set of simple rules about English grammar, would identify a salient word or phrase in the sentence and analyze the syntactical context in which it was used. The program would then, following another set of rules, transform the sentence into a new sentence that had the appearance of being a response to the original. The computer-generated sentence would appear almost instantly on the student’s terminal, giving the illusion of a conversation.
In a January 1966 paper introducing his program, Weizenbaum provided an example of how it worked. If a person typed the sentence “I am very unhappy these days,” the computer would need only know that the phrase “I am” typically comes before a description of the speaker’s current situation or state of mind. The computer could then recast the sentence into the reply “How long have you been very unhappy these days?” The program worked, Weizenbaum explained, by first applying “a kind of template to the original sentence, one part of which matched the two words ‘I am’ and the remainder [of which] isolated the words ‘very unhappy these days.’” It then used an algorithmic “reassembly kit,” tailored to the template, that included a rule specifying that “any sentence of the form ‘I am BLAH’” should be “transformed to ‘How long have you been BLAH,’ independently of the meaning of BLAH.” 1
Weizenbaum’s application was a product of its time. During the 1950s and ’60s, the enthusiasm for computers, software programming, and artificial intelligence gave rise not only to the idea that the human brain is a type of computer but to the sense that human language is the output of one of the algorithms running inside that computer. As David Golumbia explains in The Cultural Logic of Computation , a new breed of “computational linguists,” led by Weizenbaum’s MIT colleague Noam Chomsky, posited that the form of the “natural language” that people speak and write reflects “the operation of the computer inside the human mind that performs all linguistic operations.” 2 In a 1958 article in the journal Information and Control , Chomsky had written that “one possible method for describing a grammar is in terms of a program for a universal Turing machine.” 3 What made the computationalist theory so compelling was that it came wrapped in a seductive “penumbra of technological newness,” writes Golumbia. It offered a “mechanic clarity,” replacing language’s human “messiness” with “a clean internal computer.” 4 By reverse-engineering the way people talk, you could discover language’s underlying code, which you could then replicate as software.
Weizenbaum named his program ELIZA, after Eliza Doolittle, the cockney flower girl who, in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion , learns to speak proper English under the tutelage of the haughty phonetics professor Henry Higgins. To make the simulated conversations a little more interesting, Weizenbaum also gave his artificial interlocutor a persona—that of a Rogerian
Similar Books
