"WELCOME"

A long long time ago, when Clinton was president:
I hear a Macintosh computer start up, (that glorious stretched out C -Major chord) and I get a chill down my spine. I log into my (now out of date) AOL e-mail and get a "Welcome Bryan" (I thought it was awesome that I could program my AOL e-mail to say my name as it started up...oh 7th grade) at the start up. I then get bored, and start to mess with text to speech and had my computer reassuring me that everything would be all right, and that my sister didn't really mean to say the things she said to me...I then proceed to log off and go to bed to start the whole process of being a teen all over again.

I'll stop with the stories, and get to Hofstadter and the Eliza Effect. I brought up this tale of me way back when to connect with what Hofstadter brings up on page 157 when he is talking about how an ATM is grateful that it received a deposit slip and very thoughtfully printing out "THANK YOU" on its screen. Now, I agree with Hofstadter that the ATM has no lifelike structure on the inside, and that people just mistakenly think that something like this is all right to say. A mistake yes, reality no. A person could defend the issue, saying that since it reacts to what a human does it has intelligence, but no sane human would ever think an ATM can think on its own. It needs some type on user input before it can get to the end result of "THANK YOU" .

This is what Hofstadter was getting to when he was talking about the ELIZA project. That it is not necessarily the case that the computer it "helping" a person through a hard time, but merely reacting to what the user is inputting. This is no different than the AIM bot such as smarterchild.

A side note, as I am typing a red line will appear below a misspelled word. Does the computer "know" that it is misspelled and wants you to correct it? No, it is just linked up to a dictionary and when an unknown word appears or a word that is close to a word in the dictionary appears it will throw the red line on the page which tells the user to correct it.

-Bryan