Our death is our last service for the world: If we didn’t clear the path, following generations would not have to recreate human culture. It would become stiff, changeless, thus dead. And with the death of culture everything human would perish, too.

– Joseph Weizenbaum in one of his last e-mails (translated from German)

Joseph Weizenbaum died yesterday at the age of 85 in Berlin from a stroke.

Born in Berlin, Germany to Jewish parents, he escaped Nazi Germany in 1936, emigrating with his family to the United States. He started studying mathematics in 1941 in the US, but his studies were interrupted by the war, during which he served in the military. Around 1950 he worked on analog computers, and helped create a digital computer for Wayne State University. In 1955 he worked for General Electric on the first computer used for banking, and in 1963 took a position at MIT.

In 1966, he published a comparatively simple program called ELIZA which demonstrated natural language processing by engaging humans into a conversation resembling that with an empathic psychologist. The program applied pattern matching rules to the human’s statements to figure out its replies. (Programs like this are now called chatterbots.) Weizenbaum was shocked that his program was taken seriously by many users, who would open their hearts to it. He started to think philosophically about the implications of Artificial Intelligence and later became one of its leading critics. His influential 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason displays his ambivalence towards computer technology and lays out his case: while Artificial Intelligence may be possible, we should never allow computers to make important decisions because computers will always lack human qualities such as compassion and wisdom. This he saw as a consequence of their not having been raised in the emotional environment of a human family.

I feel honoured to have met Joseph Weizenbaum in person about three years ago, when he gave a lecture at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany. He was a very charismatic and gifted speaker with important messages that not enough people take to heart, even I did not, at that time.

Farewell, Joseph Weizenbaum.

(Paragraphs about Weizenbaums life taken from Wikipedia, quotation found at heise.de)

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