Joseph Weizenbaum

Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer programmer who helped advance artificial intelligence only to become a critic of the technology later in his life, has died. He was 85. Weizenbaum died March 5 of complications from stomach cancer at a daughter's home in Groeben, just outside the German capital, Miriam Weizenbaum, one of his four daughters, said Thursday. Weizenbaum was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the mid-1960s when he developed ELIZA -- named for Eliza Doolittle, the heroine of "My Fair Lady" -- which became his best-known contribution to computer programming. The program allowed a person to "converse" with a computer, using what the person said to create the computer's reply. "Weizenbaum was shocked to discover that many users were taking his program seriously and were opening their hearts to it. The experience prompted him to think philosophically about the implications of artificial intelligence, and, later, to become a critic of it," the MIT newsletter Tech Talk said Wednesday. In his 1976 book "Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation," Weizenbaum suggested it could be both dangerous and immoral to assume computers could eventually take over any human role. "No other organism, and certainly no computer, can be made to confront genuine human problems in human terms," he wrote. Weizenbaum was born Jan. 8, 1923, in Berlin and fled to the United States in 1936 with his Jewish family to escape Nazi persecution, according to a short 2003 biography published by Magdeburg's Leibniz-Institut fuer Neurobiologie. He began studying math at what was then Wayne University in Detroit in 1941, but broke off a year later to join the U.S. Army Air Corps where he served as a meteorologist. He joined a General Electric Co. team in 1955 that designed and built the first computer system dedicated to banking operations. Besides his work at MIT, he held academic appointments at Harvard, Stanford and the University of Bremen, among others. He was the Scientific Council chairman of Berlin's Institute of Electronic Business at the time of his death. Weizenbaum was buried at a small family service in the Jewish Cemetery in Berlin. A public memorial is scheduled for March 18 in Berlin. Besides his four daughters, Weizenbaum is survived by a son from a previous marriage and five grandchildren. ------ Associated Press writer Mark Pratt reported from Boston.