Embedded Files
Edmund Berkeley (1909-1988)
Page from CBI 50 Edmund Berkeley Papers Box 47 Folder 35.
20 Nov 2024, Rebecca Roach, Guest Post.
In the archives of the Charles Babbage Institute lie a remarkable set of documents dating from 1965. They are part of the papers of Edmund Berkeley, a pioneering figure in computer science, who co-founded the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1947. Berkeley corresponded with Joseph Weizenbaum, the creator of the ELIZA software system, who apparently sent him this example of (among other things) the strong emotional responses that interacting with the programme and script could evoke. Berkeley, a name unfamiliar to many today, was an early computer scientist, who studied mathematics and logic at Harvard. This exchange is particularly fascinating because it represents a meeting of minds between two figures who understood early on that the social and psychological implications of computing would be as significant as its technical capabilities.
Berkeley's 1949 book Giant Brains, or Machines That Think was one of the first popular works to explore the potential of computers and throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he published Computers and Automation, a computer magazine, which featured articles about the social implications of computing alongside technical content. Berkeley wrote extensively about privacy concerns and the potential for computers to be used for surveillance, issues that would become mainstream topics in later years. He was one of the first to recognise that computers would play a crucial role in military systems, and he argued for the development of ethical guidelines for computer scientists. Berkeley also co-created his own early chatbot, a programme designed to emulate an “elevator operator” (note the service and class associations) which could converse about the weather.
I came across this material as part of my research for a book I am currently writing, Machine Talk, which offers an alternative history of computing from the perspective of the writers and poets, women, non-Western and otherwise marginalised figures who often get left out of the stories we tell about computer innovation. Indeed, women are normally featured as the users (see the Computers and Automation cover above), rather than the inventors, of computers in this early period—this is despite the crucial contributions of people like Grace Hopper, Margaret Masterman, and Betty Holberton. The book is also a history of the idea of computers, not as “machines that think”, but as “machines that talk”.
This all might seem like an odd topic for a literature professor, but I am keen to show that literature and computing are far from oppositional. They have shared intellectual, institutional and technological roots. The history of “machines that talk” is also the history of computers as linguistic, and textual tools.
My own interest in ELIZA, aside from it being the most famous of talking machines, comes from the fact that we are more likely to be familiar with the stories about this feminised program than we are with many real women in computer history. I am interested in knowing why that is and how we might change it: I am interested in what it is in the origin story of ELIZA that makes it so culturally compelling, even today.
Blogpost by Rebecca Roach, Associate Professor of Contemporary Literature, University of Birmingham, https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/english/roach-rebecca.
Digital Images courtesy of the Charles Babbage Institute Archives, Edmund Berkley Collection, University of Minnesota Libraries.
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