Practical Ethics July 4, 2024
Written by MSt in Practical Ethics student Dr Jeremy Gauntlett-Gilbert
Human beings, as a species, love to tell stories and to imagine that there are person-like agents behind events. The Ancient Greeks saw the rivers and the winds as personalised deities, placating them if they appeared ‘angry’. Psychologists in classic 1940s experiments were impressed at how participants could generate complex narratives about animations of small abstract shapes simply bumping into each other.
This human tendency collided with technology in the 1960s. Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist, wrote software that would respond to a user’s text input with counselling-type responses. For example, the computer would “reply” with phrases like “I’m sorry to hear you’re depressed”, or reframe the person’s statement as...
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