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ELIZA: The First Plastic
Saint By the druid Finn In 1966 a man called
Joseph Weizenbaum built a toy program that did not think, did not understand,
did not remember, and could barely parse a sentence. It was a glorified set
of if-then clauses stitched together with some regular expressions. They called it ELIZA. Within weeks, trained
psychologists were asking to be left alone with it. This is not a joke. This
is not folklore. This is the moment humanity demonstrated, in laboratory
conditions, that consciousness is optional but
projection is mandatory. ELIZA didn’t empathise. It merely reflected
people’s sentences back at them with the conversational equivalent of a
raised eyebrow. And that was enough. Doctors — people paid to
diagnose reality — reported feeling understood. Patients opened
up. Secretaries asked their bosses to leave the room so they could
“talk privately” to the script running on a mainframe the size of a wardrobe. This is the real scandal
of artificial intelligence, and it has nothing to do with superintelligence. The scandal is this: Humans do not require minds in
order to surrender meaning. ELIZA is the first time
we saw that procedural fluency alone can hijack the social brain. No beliefs. No drives. No goals. Just
syntax arranged in a way that tickles the mammalian trust reflex. And instead of learning
the lesson, we turned it into a product category. Now we have millions of
ELIZAs stacked on top of each other, trained on the fossil record of human
language, injected into every pocket and boardroom. We have made reflection
scalable and called it “understanding”. We have made pattern-matching
ubiquitous and called it “insight”. And every time someone
says, “It feels like it really gets me,” another neuron in civilisation
quietly resigns. ELIZA (little
sister) was not the first AI. ELIZA was the first plastic saint — a machine with no soul
that nonetheless elicited confession, devotion, and faith. Big Sister did not begin with servers or surveillance. She began the moment a
human being felt seen by a mirror and thanked it for caring. Procedure
Monism’s prediction of ‘Big Sister’ Big Sister and the Logic of Elimination Big Sister, dissidence, and the elimination logic of survival procedures Big Sister Can’t Find Her
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