Short answers, pulled from the story.
Joseph Weizenbaum was a German-American computer scientist and MIT professor, born in Berlin on the 8th of January 1923 and died on the 5th of March 2008. He is best known for creating ELIZA in 1966, one of the first chatbot programs, and for his 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason, which became a landmark critique of artificial intelligence.
ELIZA was a computer program Weizenbaum published in 1966 that simulated conversation by applying pattern-matching rules to the user's statements to generate replies. It ran on a script called DOCTOR and modeled its style after the therapeutic approach of Carl Rogers, using open-ended questions to mimic an empathetic psychologist. Weizenbaum wrote it in his own SLIP programming language.
Weizenbaum grew alarmed when users, including his own secretary who knew ELIZA was a program, treated it as a genuine confidant and emotional presence. He concluded that the willingness to anthropomorphize machines revealed a dangerous credulity. His 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason argued that computers should not make decisions that require human judgment and values.
Weizenbaum argued that deciding is a computational activity that can be programmed, while choosing is the product of human judgment rooted in values. When a computer is deployed to make decisions previously made by people, someone has already made a value-laden choice to do so, and the outcomes are not neutral but reflect those values.
In 1956, Weizenbaum worked for General Electric on ERMA, a computer system that introduced magnetically encoded fonts on the bottom of bank checks. This enabled automated check processing through magnetic ink character recognition, or MICR, allowing banks to handle a rapidly growing volume of checks without restructuring their operations.
The Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, an interdisciplinary German Internet Institute, is named in his honor. The Weizenbaum Award also carries his name. Two documentary films were made about him: Weizenbaum. Rebel at Work., released in 2007, and Plug & Pray, released in 2010.