Science & invention
Joseph Weizenbaum
1923–2008 · computer scientist
MIT computer scientist who wrote ELIZA, the first famous chatbot, and later warned against trusting computers with human judgment; he studied and built early computers at Wayne State.
- Born
Berlin, Germany- Died
Gröben, Germany
aged 85- Detroit years
- 1941–1950s
- Field
- Science & invention
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Weizenbaum was born in Berlin to a Jewish family that fled Nazi Germany for the United States in January 1936. He began studying mathematics at Wayne University in Detroit in 1941, broke off in 1942 to serve as a meteorologist in the Army Air Corps, and returned to Wayne after the war, earning a bachelor's degree in 1948 and a master's in 1950. As a research assistant at Wayne in the early 1950s he worked on analog computers and helped build a digital computer, experience that led to a job at General Electric, where he worked on ERMA, the system that brought magnetic-ink check processing to banking. At MIT in the mid-1960s he wrote ELIZA, a program that mimicked a psychotherapist. Alarmed at how readily people confided in it, he became a leading critic of artificial intelligence in Computer Power and Human Reason (1976).
Highlights
- Created ELIZA (1964–1966), an early natural-language conversation program
- Wayne University: BS in mathematics 1948, MS 1950
- Helped build a digital computer at Wayne in the early 1950s
- Author of Computer Power and Human Reason (1976)
02 / Their Detroit places
Their Detroit places 1
Where they lived, worked, performed and liked to hang out. Closed and demolished places stay here too, because they are part of the city's history.
Studied here · 1941–1942; 1946–1950s
Wayne State University (then Wayne University)
He studied mathematics here (BS 1948, MS 1950) and, as a research assistant, helped build a digital computer.