Computer Power and Human Reason
Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation is a 1976 book by Joseph Weizenbaum, the MIT computer scientist who wrote the early conversational program ELIZA. Having seen how readily people confided in his simple software, Weizenbaum turned critic, arguing that just because a task can be computed does not mean it should be handed over to a machine. He draws a line between calculation and human judgment, and warns against surrendering moral choices to systems that cannot understand them. It is a thoughtful, sometimes polemical work of ideas, still widely cited in debates about technology and its proper limits.