Before miniaturization made them all but disappear, computers were experienced as physical things. [...] But their magic had its limits because they didn’t work very well. Any illusion of spiritual embodiment was shattered when you had to clear up a jammed paper tape. If you were on a first-name basis with the mechanic who oiled the gears and adjusted the set screws, you were unlikely to attribute transcendent qualities to the machine even on the days when it worked perfectly.
But people were beginning to converse with computers without seeing them, and it turned out that even the flimsiest screen—between Dorothy the user and Oz the computer—seduced people into regarding the machine as human, or even wizardly.
ELIZA was the original chatbot, created by MIT’s Joseph Weizenbaum in the mid-1960s. Named after the reprogrammed flower girl of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Harry R. Lewi, Harvard Magazine
breve storia dell'intelligenza artificiale
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