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One thing I learned in therapy is that I have significant issues with my mother. Another thing is that therapists have a collection of secret little therapist tricks to get you to talk about your mommy issues.

You lean in, they lean in. You make eye contact, they make eye contact. You stare at the ceiling, they cough until you look at them and/or apply the Heimlich maneuver.

So when my friend, virtual-reality researcher, and inventor Jacki Morie introduced me to SimSensei, the clever software system behind a computer-created virtual therapist, I thought the NSA had hacked into some therapist’s secret little tricks file.

A life-like image on a computer screen ran through all those little tricks better than most real therapists. I was careful to not look at the ceiling. I had no idea how to do the Heimlich on a Vizio 50-inch monitor.

“SimSensei,” Morie explained, “uses a webcam to read facial expressions and body language. The program also converts what you say into text to extract meaning and prosody, the rise and fall in voice pitch to determine some emotional affect..” From that data the virtual therapist fashions a response. An unnerving response.

Although its physical actions were startling, the virtual therapist’s verbal parrying had a familiar ring to it.

It sounded like Eliza.

No, not my mother. Eliza is the brainchild of Joseph Weizenbaum, a 1960s computer scientist and the first person to lose his job because of artificial intelligence. Only, he wasn’t replaced by an artificially-intelligent computer, he built the first one.

And then lived to regret it.

Weizenbaum designed Eliza to mimic the behavior of a Rogerian therapist, and even in the 21st century, after 50 years of living with technology has sucked most of the awe out of each new invention, it’s easy to forget this 1960’s computer program isn’t human. (Google can point you to multiple versions of Eliza, some better than others, and you can see for yourself.) A conversation with Eliza might go something like this (Eliza’s responses are in capital letters):

I’ve seen stoic adults and giggly 8th-grade girls pour their hearts out to Eliza, sharing secrets that could keep them out of politics forever.

But Eliza is a parlor trick, and Weizenbaum a shrewd illusionist. He wrote a program that parsed the user’s input into parts of speech, and then used a limited set of grammatical rules to construct responses. This was Weizenbaum’s attempt to debunk claims that computers could be intelligent.

For example, Eliza has rules for creating the past tenses of verbs, for selecting appropriate pronouns, and for converting statements into questions. It was a testimony to Weizenbaum’s creativity and understanding of human nature that he was able to fool both computer scientists and lay people alike.

One group he fooled, however, frightened him.

Professional psychologists solicited his help in deploying Eliza as a therapeutic tool. Weizenbaum warning them that Eliza could do more harm than good in cases where patients needed expert care. When these professionals, whose comments were often sensationalized by the popular media, persisted in their efforts, Weizenbaum left his job in computer research.

He became an outspoken critic of artificial intelligence for the rest of his life.

“The danger is we tend to personify our computers,” Morie said, “and how much more are we going to personify them when they look and act like human beings? If someone had a total breakdown in front of SimSensei—somebody kills themselves because the virtual human didn’t say the right kind of thing—then what?”

Morie could be channeling Weizenbaum. In 1981 he told the Boston Globe, “The relevant issues are neither technological nor even mathematical; they are ethical. Since we do not now have ways of making computers wise, we ought not now give computers tasks that demand wisdom.”**

The danger, it seems, is not in our stars but in ourselves. Artificial intelligence is scary and threatening in the way a horror movie is: by suspending our disbelief we give the movie—or the virtual therapist—the power to frighten us.

As the product of choice, not calculation, human behavior is not mechanical. It is a uniquely human quality.

Just like issues with your mother.

Courtesy of Dr. Jacquelyn Ford Morie

Photo: Ulrich Hansen via Wikimedia Commons