27 ELIZA—A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine (1966)

Joseph Weizenbaum (1923-2008) was a German Jewish refugee who came to the United States with his family at the age of 13. After studying mathematics and computing at Wayne State University, he joined the MIT faculty in computer science. There, starting in 1964, he wrote the first example of what we would now call chatbots—programs that "know" very little but create an illusion of conversation by manipulating the discourse of their conversational partners. He was surprised that people engaged intensely with his simple program, as though it was human. Famously, his own staff assistant, who knew better than anyone that no human being was answering her musings, asked Weizenbaum to leave the room while she was using Eliza (Weizenbaum, 1976, p. 6). It was as though she thought he was eavesdropping on a personal conversation.