The Thrill — And The Mystery — Of A 1970s Bell Labs AI Chatbot Known As ‘Red Father’

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In its heyday, AT&T’s Bell Labs was the center of innovation, akin to Silicon Valley today. With AI chatbots in the news, I wondered what happened to a now-vanished early version I used at the famed research institution’s New Jersey offices.

, he showed how a life-sized magnetic mouse named Theseus navigated its way around a maze, remembering the directions that worked for future efforts. “He can learn from experience,” Shannon says in the film. “He can add new information and adapt to changes.”

, Weizenbaum became disillusioned with AI and later in his life cautioned against the technological advances that he’d once developed. In his 1976 book,, he warned about the potential dehumanization of computerized decision-making. Bell Labs' researchers John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain won the Nobel Prize in 1956 for their invention of the transistor.Bell Labs’ Red Father operated very similarly to Eliza, and was perhaps modeled on it. “It would try to parse as much information out of what you had entered, and use that to respond to you,” Bosch says. “It was an early attempt at a conversational interface with a computer.

 

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