I thought this was a good example of how technology presses forward. Here is an interesting excerpt from a good article on AI and communication.
From: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2011/03/mind-vs-machine/8386/
HOW TO TALK LIKE A HUMAN When the Turing Test was first proposed in 1950, it was a hypothetical: technology was nowhere near the point at which a practical test was possible. But, as we know, it got there; the first conversational computer program to attract significant notice and attention was Eliza, written in 1964 and 1965 by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT. Modeled after a Rogerian therapist, Eliza worked on a very simple principle: extract key words from the users’ own language, and pose their statements back to them. (“I am unhappy.” “Do you think coming here will help you not to be unhappy?”) If in doubt, it might fall back on some completely generic phrases, like “Please go on.” This technique of fitting the users’ statements into predefined patterns and responding with a prescribed phrasing of its own—called “template matching”—was Eliza’s only capacity.
A look at an Eliza transcript reveals how adeptly such an impoverished set of rules can, in the right context, pass at a glance for understanding:
User: Men are all alike.
Eliza: In what way?
User: They’re always bugging us about something or other.
Eliza: Can you think of a specific example?
User: Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
Eliza: Your boyfriend made you come here.
User: He says I’m depressed much of the time.
Eliza: I am sorry to hear you are depressed.
User: It’s true. I am unhappy.
Eliza: Do you think coming here will help you not to be unhappy?
User: I need some help, that much seems certain.
Eliza: What would it mean to you if you got some help?
User: Perhaps I could learn to get along with my mother.
Eliza: Tell me more about your family.
The results were stunning: many of the people who first talked with Eliza were convinced that they were having a genuine human exchange. In some cases, even Weizenbaum’s own insistence to the contrary was of no use. People asked to be left alone to talk “in private,” sometimes for hours, and returned with reports of having had a meaningful therapeutic experience. Meanwhile, academics leapt to conclude that Eliza represented “a general solution to the problem of computer understanding of natural language.”
One of the strangest twists to the Eliza story, however, was the reaction of the medical community, which decided Weizenbaum had hit upon something both brilliant and useful. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, for example, said of Eliza in 1966:
Several hundred patients an hour could be handled by a computer system designed for this purpose. The human therapist, involved in the design and operation of this system, would not be replaced, but would become a much more efficient man. The famed scientist Carl Sagan, in 1975, concurred:
I can imagine the development of a network of computer psychotherapeutic terminals, something like arrays of large telephone booths, in which, for a few dollars a session, we would be able to talk with an attentive, tested, and largely non-directive psychotherapist. As for Weizenbaum, appalled and horrified, he did something almost unheard-of: an about-face on his entire career. He pulled the plug on the Eliza project, encouraged his own critics, and became one of science’s most outspoken opponents of AI research. But the genie was out of the bottle, and there was no going back. The basic “template matching” skeleton and approach of Eliza has been reworked and implemented in some form or another in almost every chat program since, including the contenders at the 2009 Loebner Prize competition. The enthusiasm—as well as the unease—about these programs has only grown.
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