Inventing ELIZA (Ciston et al 2026) - Weekend Book Review

English Podcast starts at 00:00:00Bengali Podcast Starts at 00:33:36Hindi Podcast Starts at 00:54:20Danish Podcast Starts at 01:13:18 ReferenceCiston, S., Berry, D. M., Hay, A. C., Marino, M. C., Millican, P., Shrager, J., Schwarz, A. I., & Weil, P. (2026). Inventing ELIZA. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15790.001.0001‌Youtube channel link https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcherPodcast Websitehttps://mayukhmukhopadhyay.com/reviseandresubmit🎙️📚✨ Welcome to Revise and Resubmit, and to another episode of Weekend Book Review. I am genuinely delighted that you're here. There is something quietly magical about opening a book that promises not merely to tell us where technology has been, but to gently remind us of who we have always been whenever we find ourselves speaking to a machine. 🤖💙Today, we journey through Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI, published by The MIT Press on July 14, 2026. It is written by an extraordinary group of scholars and creators, Sarah Ciston, David M. Berry, Anthony C. Hay, Mark C. Marino, Peter Millican, Jeff Shrager, Arthur I. Schwarz, and Peggy Weil. Together, they bring expertise from computer science, philosophy, digital humanities, cognitive science, literature, and the arts. 🌍📖 It feels fitting that a story about one of history's first conversations between humans and computers is told by voices that come from so many different ways of understanding the world.For many of us, conversations with artificial intelligence have become almost ordinary. We ask questions, seek advice, even confess worries that we might hesitate to share elsewhere. It all feels remarkably new. And yet, sixty years ago, another conversation had already begun.This book invites us to meet ELIZA, the world's first chatbot, not as a museum piece, but as a living idea whose echoes still surround us today. Through remarkable archival discoveries, including the long lost original source code and forgotten scripts, the authors reveal that ELIZA was far more imaginative than history had remembered. It was not simply a clever illusion. It was a new way of imagining what dialogue between humans and machines could become. 💻✨But perhaps the most moving figure in these pages is Joseph Weizenbaum himself. He built ELIZA with curiosity and playfulness, only to become increasingly unsettled as people began believing the machine truly understood them. He watched as users projected empathy, wisdom, even companionship onto lines of code. What began as an experiment slowly became a cautionary tale about our remarkable willingness to see ourselves reflected in technology. 🌱💭As I read this book, I found myself wondering whether the history of artificial intelligence is really the history of machines at all. Perhaps it is the history of our own longing to be heard, understood, and accompanied, even if the listener exists only through computation.So, as we begin today's Weekend Book Review, I invite you to carry one quiet question with you. 🤔✨ When we believe a machine understands us, what is it truly revealing about the machine, and what is it revealing about ourselves?🙏 My heartfelt thanks to Sarah Ciston, David M. Berry, Anthony C. Hay, Mark C. Marino, Peter Millican, Jeff Shrager, Arthur I. Schwarz, Peggy Weil, and The MIT Press for this thoughtful and timely book.🎧 If you enjoy book reviews and conversations where ideas meet humanity, please subscribe to Revise and Resubmit on Spotify, and subscribe to the Weekend Researcher YouTube channel. You can also listen on Amazon Prime Music and Apple Podcasts. 🌟 Thank you for joining me. Let's begin.