Plug and Pray

Joseph Weizenbaum – few have shaken up the computer scene of the past decade as much as he has. The mathematician was among the earliest computer developers and, as the creator of the speech program Eliza, a pioneer in artificial intelligence. Like most of his colleagues, he profited from the millions of investment dollars unleashed during the Cold War arms race. In 1975, he became world-renowned for his ever timely book, "Computer Power and Human Reason", a reckoning with the pervasive myth that science is independent from society's set of values. The responsibility of every individual, especially scientists, for fostering a just and humanistic world was from that point on a central issue in his life. The more responsibility we give to computers, he warned, the more our idea of what it means to be human will change, until finally we will view even ourselves as mere machines.