Joseph Weizenbaum eventually retired from MIT, but he continued speaking out against the dangers of AI
until he died in 2008 at the age of 85. And while he was an important humanist thinker, some people felt like he went too far.
Pamela McCorduck, author of
Machines Who Think, knew Weizenbaum over several decades. She says he burned a lot of bridges in the AI community and became almost a caricature of himself towards the end, endlessly railing against the rise of machines.
He also may have missed something that Darcy has thought about a lot with Woebot: the idea that humans engage in a kind of play when we interact with chatbots. We’re not necessarily being fooled, we’re just fascinated to see ourselves reflected back in these intelligent machines.
