E.L.I.Z.A
I don't believe in Magick
I don't believe in I-Ching
I don't believe in Bible
I don't believe in Tarot
I don't believe in Hitler
I don't believe in Jesus
I don't believe in Kennedy
I don't believe in Buddha
I don't believe in Mantra
I don't believe in Gita
I don't believe in Yoga
I don't believe in Kings
I don't believe in Elvis
I don't believe in Zimmerman
I don't believe in Beatles --
I just Believe in Me
Yoko & Me
That's Reality.
E.L.I.Z.A is an early
natural language processing computer program
created from 1964 to 1966
at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
by Joseph Weizenbaum.
Created to demonstrate
The Superficiality of Communication
between Humans and Machines,
E.L.I.Z.A simulated Conversation
by using a “pattern matching”
and substitution methodology that gave users an
Illusion of Understanding
on the part of The Program,
but had no built in framework
for contextualising events.
Directives on How to Interact
were provided by “scripts”,
written originally in MAD-Slip,
which allowed E.L.I.Z.A
to process user inputs and engage
in discourse following
The Rules and Directions
of The Script.
The most famous script,
DOCTOR, simulated
A Rogerian Psychotherapist
(in particular, Carl Rogers, who was well-known for simply parroting back at patients what they had just said),
and used Rules, dictated in The Script,
to respond with non-directional questions to user inputs.
As such, E.L.I.Z.A was one of the first chatterbots
and one of the first programs capable of
attempting The Turing Test.
" Rosenbaum was astonished —
He discovered that EVERYONE
that tried E.L.I.Z.A
became engrossed.
They would sit for HOURS,
telling The Machine about
their Inner Feelings,
and INCREDIBLY intimate details
of Their Lives....
They ALSO Liked it,
because it was free of any kind of
'Patronising Elitism' —
One person said, "After all,
The Computer Doesn't Burn-out,
Look Down on You,
or Try to Have Sex with You."
[ 'til you ask it to. ]
What E.L.I.Z.A showed,
was that in An Age of Individualism,
what made people feel SECURE
was having THEMSELVES
reflected back to them —
just like in a Mirror.
Artificial Intelligence changed direction,
and started to create
New Systems that did just that,
but on a GIANT scale —
They were called
'Intelligent Agents'.
They worked by monitoring individuals,
gathering vast amounts of data
about their past behaviour —
and then looked for patterns and correlations,
from which they could predict
What They Would WANT
in The Future.
It was A System That
Ordered The World in
A Way That was
Centred Around YOU......
And in An Age of Anxious Individualism,
Frightened of The Future —
That was REASSURING.
Just like E.L.I.Z.A —
A Safe Bubble [ SafeSpace ],
that protected you from
the complexities of
The World outside.
