The Economist.
Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist.
I'm Jason Palmer.
And I'm Rosie Blau.
Today on the show, the surge of sexually transmitted infections in Europe and a tribute to Ezra Pound's translator daughter.
First up, though,
It's kind of amazing that a computer program from the 1960s still has such influence
in what we talk about now, still in the dawn of the generative AI era.
Eliza was, in essence, the first chatbot, the brainchild of a computer scientist at MIT in 1966.
In today's terms, it was primitive.
All list referencing and pattern matching and bouncing users' statements back rephrased as questions.
The weird part was how those users often had the conviction
they were typing to a machine that was thinking, conscious even.
Since then, it's been called the Eliza effect.
A reminder that humans are still kind of bad at determining what is conscious and what consciousness is.
The idea that machines could have emotions, can talk to us,
have their own desires and maybe even take over the world.
All of that is a classic of science fiction.
But it's always felt really far away until now.
Alok Jha is The Economist's science and technology editor and hosts Babbage, our sister show on science.