David Pearce

But if you're wondering how serious this plan actually is, Paramount reportedly hasn't even decided where its new headquarters would be, and it would be scheduled to move there in like six weeks. I'm not sure this is a real plan, at least not yet. Finally, we're only a day away from Google's next big launch event where we're expecting new Pixel phones, including maybe new Foldable, a new Pixel Watcher 2, and maybe even an AirTag-style Pixel Tracker. There's a big event tomorrow night hosted by Trevor Noah, but if it's anything like Jimmy Fallon's weird infomercial last year, you can safely skip that one. voice-verified

and the discipline to admit when you've broken it. Check out Create or Destroy Reimagining Marketing on YouTube and your favorite podcast app. All right, let's talk chatbots. I am joined now by two of the co-authors of Inventing Eliza, David Barry, professor at the University of Sussex. Welcome to the show. voice-verified

Thank you. And Mark Marino, professor at the University of Southern California. Welcome to the show. Hello. Thanks for having us. You're the American one. David's the British one. If you're listening, that's a useful way to remember who's who on this one. Yeah. Otherwise, we're indistinguishable. That's right. You would never be able to tell the two of you apart except for the accents. So it's good that we have those. I want to go back. voice-verified

to the beginning here. And I want to talk about Joseph Weisenbaum a little bit, because I think a lot of the study that you guys have done is of Joseph Weisenbaum and his own feelings about the thing that he created. So give me just a flavor, David, of who Joseph Weisenbaum was. voice-verified

Mark, this is an interesting moment in time that you guys reckon with a bunch in the book is kind of this question of what was Joseph Weisenbaum building when he built Eliza? And there is a sense that he made a therapist, which you prove pretty conclusively is not true, right? That's the demo everybody remembers where you're talking to a therapist. That was not the original or only conception of Eliza, that it's actually a collection of chatbots. voice-verified

But it also doesn't seem like he was building what he perceived to be some kind of breakthrough user product that someday somebody would sell and make lots of money on. That there was something more philosophically questioning about this thing that he was building. What do you think he was building when he was building Eliza in those early days? That's a great question, David. I think it's complex. So Jeff Schrager, one of our collaborators, he's fond of just pointing to the title of that initial paper in 1966. voice-verified

And overwhelmingly, people who sit down and experience this very simple, very basic chatbot, Eliza, fall for it. They believe in the thing. There are lots of people who cannot be convinced that there is not a person on the other end. The experience works. Like you said, Mark, the magic trick is successful. voice-verified

And I've been trying to decide, is there something about that that is fundamentally about inexperience with computers? And if you just gave that to a bunch of people who had used this kind of technology before, if it would have been less new and less surprising and less magical, or if there is something deeply human inside of us that just desperately wants that magic trick to work. And my sense is it's probably a little bit of both, but I know you've both spent a lot of time thinking about this. David, where do you land on this? voice-verified

The reckoning with all of this strikes me as the thing that then Joe Weisenbaum goes and does, right? Like he has this real, I think, I get the sense he was surprised by how well Eliza worked. That he's like, I built this thing that seems like an interesting way to communicate with computers. And then he's like, oh my God, people are pouring their heart and soul into this thing, thinking that the computer is a person. And he seems to, rather than do what voice-verified

What it seems like everyone else did at the time and what certainly everybody's doing right now, which is say, you know, oh, my God, I just got rich. This is going to be incredible. And technology is going to take over. There's Scourge McDucking rubbing their hands together. He has a real crisis of faith in all of this. And before we skip to now, I just I want to get to kind of where Joseph Weisenbaum got to at the end of at the end of all of this process, at the end of all of this thinking. voice-verified

He seems to have a real kind of Oppenheimer, what have I done kind of moment at the end of all of this. David, where does he net out after seeing what Eliza accomplishes and does to people? So I think that's quite a complicated question, actually, because it's not... voice-verified

Stop ruining the experience. So that's the first thing that's kind of interesting. The second thing is that... People don't want to have the magic revealed to them. I think this becomes a theme that I want to stay on here. But I think that's right. Even if he says, look, it's a trick, I did it. Everybody says, no, no, no, go away. It's more fun to live in the trick. voice-verified

I wrote down a line from your book that he drew a distinction between calculating and understanding. And there's a real thread in all of this that I had not really thought of in this way, but is the sort of turning idea that humans are complicated and irrational and messy and impossible to understand. And by comparison, computers and math are perfect and rational and thus better. Yeah. voice-verified

And I think we are in a very real way living in that moment right now where there is a belief that computers are better than humans, that they are more predictable, that they are more understandable, and that those are good things and we should thus trust them more than we trust humans. I wonder if you can just... voice-verified

pull apart the way that Weizenbaum in particular was thinking about this, that we have computers that are very good. I don't think Weizenbaum ever turned against technology. He was never like a, you know, we have to unplug everything and run back into the woods. But he seemed to understand that computers were very good for certain things, but were not to be trusted or even asked to do some of the things that humans are supposed to be doing. How would you say he drew those lines? voice-verified

Well, yeah, let's talk about where we are right now, because I think, I mean, obviously a lot of the stuff that you guys have been describing is very familiar right now. We are in this moment right now where the novelty effect of LLMs has been so intense that people have had genuine good faith discussions about whether these models are alive, which just to be clear, they're not. They aren't. But I think that the fact that we are back in this 60 years later, and again, with a huge amount of voice-verified

computer fluency and history with this stuff that suggests that we should be better at this. We're not. And I think a lot of the stuff that you guys have been describing still applies this sort of deeply human idea that we want to be talking to other humans. We want to be heard. We want to we want to talk about all this stuff. voice-verified

Are we just doing this again? Does it really feel to you guys like looking at the current moment that we're in that we are just reliving a full circle version of what we did in the late 60s and early 70s? Or is there something different about the LLM moment as opposed to the Eliza moment? voice-verified

is better understanding of how the trick works, right? And this goes all the way back to the cons. Even a big part of your project has been, we want to get into the actual source code of understanding how Eliza worked, because if we can understand how it worked, we can make sense of it better, that it actually becomes very important to see the thing. And Mark, I know this is a thing you've been working on a lot, is like, how do we make code explainable? I'm curious how you point that thinking at something like voice-verified

the LLM phenomenon, which is kind of by design, an unknowable black box. A lot of the people who work with and build and operate this technology profess to not know exactly how it works. And I think I agree with the principle that we should all understand how our computers and how our systems and our platforms work much more clearly. But I do wonder if that's even possible at this moment. voice-verified

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