Eliza, the Rogerian Therapist (1999)
psych.fullerton.edu
psych.fullerton.edu
Page 4:
"DOCTOR...soon became famous...mainly because it was an easy program to demonstrate. Most other programs could not vividly demonstrate the information-processing power of a computer to visitors who did not already have some specialized knowledge"
As in, the mid-1960s, this was (one of) the first non-technical computer programs. No commands, no manual, no conceptual overview needed - just sit down and start typing.
Page 6:
"I suggested I might rig the system so that I could examine all conversations anyone had had with it, say, overnight. I was promptly bombarded with accusations that what I proposed amounted to spying on people's most intimate thoughts; clear evidence that people were conversing with the computer as if it were a person who could be appropriately and usefully addressed in intimate terms ... what I had not realized is that extremely short exposure to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people."
Page 38:
"Like highways and automobiles, they [new forms of media] enable the society to articulate entirely new forms of social action, but at the same time they irreversibly disable formerly available modes of social behavior."
... that's a pretty deep insight about social media, especially from 1976.
Pages 115-130 he writes quite critically of "hacker culture", characterizing the participants as "compulsive programmers" and comparing them to gamblers. I'm not making any judgment on his claims in those pages, but his arguments are fairly unique and I had not seen them before.
"Maybe it's because people saw it as a tool and people become emotionally attached to tools" you may think. Coincidentally his chapter following that is entitled "On Tools" where he goes into psychological literature on human-tool interaction.
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Also there's an unspoken context here that he gets a step away from a few times without hitting it:
Non-technical people understood computers from their popular depictions; perfect electronic brains; profoundly superior-to-human machines.
Some people likely assumed there was an infallibility to the interaction, as if someone, say unfamiliar with stage magic, saw a magic trick and assumed it was sorcery. People employ whatever mental model they're familiar with that fits best.
The idea it was merely just rearranging your words and feeding it back at you likely seemed just outrageously galling to be the thing a multi-million dollar machine that takes up an entire room and coming from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab is doing. No. It must be real...
Almost as outrageous as someone suggesting your sorcerer simply put the item in his pocket while he was distracting you.
Eliza, in 1965 was a computer version of Uri Geller.
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Another idea relating to Milgram, he never pointed out whether people trusted that a machine would have had safety precautions built in. Of all his variations I'm not familiar with any where he made the machine "malfunction".
Would subjects then trust the proctor but distrust the machine and back off more or perhaps, even more interesting, would there be no difference at all?
But I take your point that people at the time may have misunderstood the program, possibly believing it was actually sentient. That's a mistake belief, not a delusion.
Go get your hands on a copy, you can probably find one for under $7 on eBay
― Anaïs Nin
Pretend someone wrote that program but instead we do a 21st century mechanical turk; an elaborate brain-like device is made with glowing parts, in a glass box, about 8 feet high. There's dozens of wires probing into it and going to these two brushed metal cabinets with noisy fans and blinking lights etc, but it's all just for show.
Inside there's a simple raspberry pi running our program (the turk) and there's a keyboard and monitor hooked up to this theater piece for people to interact.
I would place real money on a very large percentage of people believing it's hard AI, some true breakthrough of science, a heralding of a new age, even though it's just a 40 year old program.
Kinda like how War of the Worlds seems to continually lead to perpetual mass panic when it's just superficially updated and played out as a radio drama - presentation emotes more than content
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
But not really any fundamental discussions, probably because it was already so well known as a thing.
Imagine Eliza GPT 2020, speech enabled friend in pocket.
Who's going to implement it?