Cognitive bias in which computers are anthropomorphised
When I was young, a friend and I set up ELIZA in BASIC on a TS2068. It was fun, for sure. About an hour in, it responded with “i am” - lower case, when everything we’d put in was in upper case.
This freaked us the fuck out for about a half hour.
Then I realized … wait a minute. Everything it can possibly say is in the code somewhere. I pored over all the things we’d put in, and finally, there it was: “i am”. The only mystery that still remains is how that got there.
They should never have stopped giving everyone the ELIZA vaccine in grade 10 computer class.
Daniel Rutter’s column, Your Computer Is Not Alive, remains relevant and evergreen.
Also, linking vintage Dan twice in the last week or so is definitely feeling like a two nickels situation, here.
I think viruses, fire, suns, and religions are alive, because they all reproduce.
We use computers to run assembly lines that make more chips, so computers are alive too.
Chatbots on monochrome CRTs hit different.
