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"I realized there was a heavy-duty change coming in biology, and I could write a really compelling novel about catastrophic evolution, punctuated equilibrium."
- Greg Bear
 |
| Sigfrid von Shrink | ||
| An automated therapist. |
Talk about passing the Turing test - this device could give the test!
| I hate it when he asks the same questions I ask myself. "Rob, you aren't very responsive today," Sigfrid says through the little loudspeaker at the head of the mat. Sometimes he uses a very lifelike dummy, sitting in an armchair, tapping a pencil and smiling quirkily at me from time to time. |
| From Gateway,
by Frederik Pohl. Published by St. Martin's Press in 1970 Additional resources -
|
In 1966 Joseph Weizenbaum published Eliza. A very short program (only a few hundred lines of code), was remarkably successful in creating the illusion of a computer psychotherapist. It works in a simple way; if the user mentions "I feel sad", Eliza might reply "Tell me more about feeling sad." Eliza worked by turning the user's question or statement around and giving it right back. This program succeeds for the same reason that that traditional talk therapy succeeds - people love to talk about themselves!
Want to talk with a real Sigfrid von Shrink? Go see ELIZA, the Computer Therapist. Just type your comment into the Input box and press return after each brief sentence. To readily see the limits of this approach, try typing something like "I feel asdfasdf" and see what you get.
Compare this device with
the robot psyche tester from Colony (1953) by Philip K. Dick,
the machine psychologist from James Blish's Cities in Flight,
the mechanotherapist from Bad Medicine (a 1956 Robert Sheckley story),
Dr. Smile, from Dick's 1964 novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
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'... the two pairs of waldoes in the screen followed in exact, simultaneous parallelism.'
'THE SPACE VESSEL was traveling swiftly… For over five thousand years they had Voyaged on and on.’
'They circled the vast audiences, dancing, twittering, chirping...'
'The sun-quilt was a patchwork of colors and materials on the inward side, but silvered on the outward side...'
'Jim, I saw them reduce four of my doctors and nurses into those little cubes!'
'Fats Jordan was hanging in the center of the Big Glass Balloon, hugging his guitar to his massive black belly above his purple shorts..'
'When confronted by hills, or rough terrain, it did not stop, but simply slowed until the task demanded equaled its steady power output.'
'... the brain is no longer subjected to the accustomed pull, and it expands slightly in all directions.'
