On a cold, blizzard-filled winter day, the collections and archives of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) seemed particularly peaceful. This silence seems to be deepening as the snow falls and accumulates. Rebecca Roach, a senior lecturer in contemporary literature at the University of Birmingham, was the only person left in the archives with the silence in her ears. She focused more on finding the voice of a protagonist – this secret secretary who never left her name. .
Rebecca searches for a missing secretary who played a pivotal role in a pivotal moment in computer history that has never been recorded. This trip to the archives aims to delve deeper into the history of chatbots, now known as “chatbots”. For many people, chatbots have become a part of everyday life From Amazon’s Alexa to Apple’s Siri to today’s ChatGPT, the emergence comes from decades of research and technological developments.
However, this Rebecca is not following contemporary technology, but the main person who makes up this history: an unnamed secretary who once had a crucial conversation with an early chatbot.
Origins of Chatbots: From Alan Turing to Eliza
The history of chatbots can be traced back to 1950, when computer science pioneer Alan Turing proposed an experiment to determine whether machines can have “intelligence”. This experiment challenges whether machines can make people tell the difference between themselves and humans by talking to them. This idea inspired early research into artificial intelligence (AI) and computer conversational systems.
As these ideas spread across academia, in the 1960s, MIT electrical engineering professor Joseph Weizenbaum developed a computer program called Eliza with the goal of simulating a conversation between humans and machines. Eliza can respond based on the text entered by the user, depending on keywords and conversion rules tell me about you.” question.” This program simulates the conversational model of psychological counseling not only to get into the form of natural language, but also to give people the “illusion of understanding”.
Eliza was named after the heroine in Pygmalion, a 1912 play by British playwright George Bernard Shaw, which was later adapted into the 1964 musical My Fair Lady. Like the transformation process of a character in a play, Eliza made big waves in the computer field. Newspapers and magazines reported on this technology and saw it as the fulfillment of Turing’s dream.
Ideas to find out about the secretary: the missing voice
The success and impact of Eliza’s program attracted so much attention that even Playboy magazine discussed its potential. However, creator Weisenbaum was ultimately uncomfortable with the invention. He did not want to believe that such a simple program could “enslave” users into believing that they were talking to an emotionally intelligent system. This idea ultimately distanced him from the artificial intelligence community over the next few decades.
Although Weissenbaum’s relationship with his invention was fraught with uncertainty, one figure does appear in fragments of this history – an unnamed secretary. According to Weisenbaum’s records, the secretary often looked at his work while he was developing Eliza’s program and showed great interest in it. One day she asked him to talk to Eliza. Even though she knew she was talking to a machine, after typing a few words, she suddenly turned to Weisenbaum and said, “Would you mind leaving the room first?”
Weisenbaum found her response troubling, pointing out that “exposure to a relatively simple computer program, even for a short period of time, can induce delusional thinking in a fairly normal person.” hatred of his own creation. However, the name of the secretary and her comments were never recorded. Like the other party in this conversation, it seems that her voice was lost in the long river of history.
Digging into the archives: Trying to get the Secretary back
But who is this “very normal person”? What does she think of Eliza? If the missing secretary played such an important role, why don’t we hear her voice? In this chapter of the history of talking devices, we only hear one side of the conversation.
In the MIT archives, Rebecca thought she should find evidence. She and he looked through the yellow papers, conversation notes, printed code files, letters and notes Weisenbaum left behind. She believed that some clues must be hidden in these products. However, although brief references to the secretary appear from time to time in letters, the specific name never appears.
Rebecca extended her search to the administrative archives of MIT’s computer department and even contacted the archives of Project MAC, where Weisenbaum worked – the hall dedicated to computer innovation at MIT. However, her name has not yet been found. She contacted MIT’s human resources office and alumni organizations, but the patiently waiting archivists seemed unable to provide further assistance.
As time passes, Rebecca’s quest ends. On the last open day of the archive, she still could not find any specific records about this secretary, and there was only the silence that history left in her ears.
Listening to the Silence: Stories of the Lost Voices and Unsung Heroes of Computing History
The search was not entirely fruitless, as Rebecca learned that many organizations have historically been incapable of recording, organizing and preserving knowledge. . In the history of academic institutions such as MIT and the development of computers, the authors of many documents – often low-status, unpaid women – have been largely excluded from the historical record.
This “silent secretary” is a symbol of those unknown heroes who have been erased from history. Her contributions, like those of the early adopters of conversational tools, were ignored. The functioning of these systems, knowledge, insights, and creativity are often taken for granted. However, underestimating these contributions affects not only the conversational technologies we design, but also our understanding of human investment in these systems.
With the development of generative artificial intelligence, we often use words like “conversational” and “prompting” when talking about user input. But what is the legal status of these “conversations”? For example, should we copyright these entries? How should the work in the training of these systems be recognized?
The wind and the snow got worse. The campus is about to be closed due to the weather, but the voice of the missing secretary has yet to be found. For the history of conversational devices, this chapter remains a one-sided conversation. While Rebecca was fighting the wind and snow to make her way home, this quiet story was still in her mind.
