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Weizenbaum did not intend to invent the chatbot. Instead, he intended to build a platform for research into human-machine conversation.
What I mean here is the cocktail party conversation. Someone says something to you that you really don’t fully understand, but because of the context and lots of other things, you are in fact able to give a response which appears appropriate, and in fact the conversation continues for quite a long time. We do it all the time, not only at cocktail parties. Indeed, I think it’s a very necessary mechanism, because we can’t, even in serious discussion, probe to the limit of possible understanding
Ada:
“The operating mechanism might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine. Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent Ada Lovelace Letters
(no interpretive machinery)
Weizenbaum, who it will be recalled had worked with Colby, explicitly recognized that ELIZA had no interpretive machinery - no way to assign meaning to the content of the conversation. Indeed, he chose the Rogerian framework precisely for the reason that that framework (or at least Weizenbaum’s gloss of it) puts almost all of the content work on the patient/user, who presumably has intact interpretive machinery: “This mode of conversation was chosen because the psychiatric interview is one of the few examples of categorized dyadic natural language communication in which one of the participating pair is free to assume the pose of knowing almost nothing of the real world.”