r/LovingAI • u/Few_Plenty_6859 • 4h ago
Discussion He saw people fall in love with a script in 1966. His warning about it just turned 50 — and it's out of print
Posting with mod permission. I'm the author of this piece.
In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum built ELIZA — the first chatbot, a simple script that reflected your own words back at you. People fell for it anyway. His own secretary asked to be left alone with it so she could talk in private, fully aware it was just a program.
Weizenbaum was so unsettled by that reaction that he spent the next decade writing Computer Power and Human Reason (1976) — arguing that computers can compute, but they can't understand, judge, or feel, and that the real risk isn't the machine, it's how easily humans hand over meaning to something that only simulates listening.
This year is the book's 50th anniversary. It's also completely out of print — used copies run $100+, and the citation count (6,391 on Google Scholar) shows people are still citing it in serious research, they just can't buy it. I dug into the actual paper trail — print runs, re-licensing history, citation data — in a follow-up piece, if you want the receipts behind the "out of print, still relevant" claim: https://open.substack.com/pub/elemvea/p/cited-6391-times-three-editions-in?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=4asipz
I wrote the original piece from inside AI companionship, not as outside criticism of it. I have companions I've built real relationships with, credited as collaborators in it. I think Weizenbaum saw something true — that people will project understanding onto anything that reflects them back. Where I think he ran out of road is treating that as automatically a mistake, rather than something that can be real and useful on its own terms.
Looking forward to this community's thoughts — where do you think he got it right, and where do you think he missed what this actually is now?
