The heteronomy of algorithms: Traditional knowledge and computational knowledge

If an active citizen should increasingly be a computationally enlightened one, replacing the autonomy of reason with the heteronomy of algorithms, then I argue in this article that we must begin teaching the principles of critiquing the computal through new notions of what we might call digital Bildung. Indeed, if civil society itself is mediated by computational systems and media, the public use of reason must also be complemented by skills for negotiating and using these computal forms to articulate such critique. Not only is there a need to raise the intellectual tone regarding computation and its related softwarization processes, but there is an urgent need to attend to the likely epistemic challenges from computation which, as presently constituted, tends towards justification through a philosophy of utility rather than through a philosophy of care for the territory of the intellect. We therefore need to develop an approach to this field that uses concepts and methods drawn from philosophy, politics, history, anthropology, sociology, media studies, computer science, and the humanities more generally, to try to understand these issues - particularly the way in which software and data increasingly penetrate our everyday life and the pressures and fissures that are created. We must, in other words, move to undertake a critical interdisciplinary research program to understand the way in which these systems are created, instantiated, and normatively engendered in both specific and general contexts.

ELIZA Reanimated: The world's first chatbot restored on the world's first time sharing system

ELIZA, created by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in the early 1960s, is usually considered the world's first chatbot. It was developed in MAD-SLIP on MIT's CTSS, the world's first time-sharing system, on an IBM 7094. We discovered an original ELIZA printout in Prof. Weizenbaum's archives at MIT, including an early version of the famous DOCTOR script, a nearly complete version of the MAD-SLIP code, and various support functions in MAD and FAP. Here we describe the reanimation of this original ELIZA on a restored CTSS, itself running on an emulated IBM 7094. The entire stack is open source, so that any user of a unix-like OS can run the world's first chatbot on the world's first time-sharing system.