What Chatbots Can Teach Us About Ourselves

There are more bots on the internet than humans. According to figures from Distil Networks, a cybersecurity firm, almost 60 percent of 2014's internet traffic consisted of automated code. Despite the world's growing population of internet users, that figure is undoubtedly higher today. Among the oldest of those bots is ELIZA, who turns 50 this year. ELIZA, who was written at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the mid-1960s by a German-Jewish computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum, can perform natural language processing and pattern match users' responses to different scripts.