Fit For The Future

About sixty years ago, MIT Professor Joseph Weizenbaum built a chatbot, named ELIZA, that could act like a psychotherapist. It was programmed to look for key words and phrases typed by a person and reflect their words back to them in its responses. Despite its simplicity, many people were so taken by it they started treating it like a real doctor. On one occasion, Weizenbaum’s secretary asked him to leave the room so she could have a private conversation with ELIZA!My first experience with them was more than thirty years ago, when studying AI at university and we had ELIZA on our university computers. I remember once, one of my uni friends, who intensely disliked one of our lecturers, spent hours on ELIZA taking out his anger and frustration in fake conversations with it (her?). Little did he know all the ELIZA conversations where saved on the university servers! He spent the next few days frantically running around looking for an IT person to delete those chats.Oh, how we laughed!Anyway ...Sixty years on fro