techno-therapy feedback loops...

[jascha]

A long time ago someone wrote a little program called Eliza, which was an amusingly dumb program that mimicked a talk therapist. It certainly wouldn't pass a Turing test, but it if you have it talk to itself (as I did earlier today with two versions open at once, in a fit of very inspired procrastination) you get dialogue that looks something like

Comments

[celesteh]

The guy who wrote Eliza did it to show that passing the Turing Test was much harder than people thought it would be and might even be impossible.

Then he found out his secretary was confiding her problems in Eiza, for real, as a form of therapy.