Joseph Weizenbaum

We saw an ad for AI that "keeps your teams on track". First, we had no words. Then, we decided to write some words.

Let's go all the way back to 1966, when Joseph Weizenbaum, a German-American Jewish computer scientist, created one of the first ever chatterbots (you know them as chatbots now), ELIZA. It (we almost wrote "she"!) was named after the character in Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion".

ELIZA was very rudimentary, especially compared to chatbots of today. In fact, you can't even fairly compare... It was about 200 lines of code.

That being said, Weizenbaum noticed something peculiar: his secretary was having private conversations with ELIZA. "I had not realized [...] that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people," Weizenbaum said.

Back to today's AI. We have worked with some great software developers... but also many horrible ones, who wrote absolutely moronic code. (Never mind the various levels of incompetent management that told these developers what to do and how to do it.) Do you really want modern chatterbots, with their millions upon millions of lines, to keep track of your teams? Your HUMAN teams? Talk about delusional!

And now, we have no more words.