Computer Programmer Joseph Weizenbaum

BERLIN -- Joseph Weizenbaum, 85, a computer programmer who helped advance artificial intelligence only to become a critic of the technology later in his life, died March 5 of complications from stomach cancer at the home of one of his daughters in Groeben, Germany.

Mr. Weizenbaum was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the mid-1960s when he developed ELIZA -- named for Eliza Doolittle, the heroine of "My Fair Lady" -- which became his best-known contribution to computer programming.

The program allowed a person to "converse" with a computer. What the person said was used to create the computer's reply.

"Weizenbaum was shocked to discover that many users were taking his program seriously and were opening their hearts to it. The experience prompted him to think philosophically about the implications of artificial intelligence, and, later, to become a critic of it," the MIT newsletter Tech Talk said.

In his 1976 book, "Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation," Mr. Weizenbaum said it could be both dangerous and immoral to assume that computers could eventually take over any human role. "No other organism, and certainly no computer, can be made to confront genuine human problems in human terms," he wrote.

Mr. Weizenbaum, who was Jewish, was born in Berlin and fled to the United States in 1936 with his family to escape Nazi persecution, according to a short 2003 biography published by Magdeburg's Leibniz-Institut fuer Neurobiologie.

He began studying math at what was then Wayne University in Detroit in 1941 but broke off a year later to join the Army Air Forces. He served as a meteorologist.

In 1955, he joined a General Electric team that designed and built the first computer system dedicated to banking operations.

Besides his work at MIT, he held academic appointments at Harvard University, Stanford University and the University of Bremen, among others. He was the chairman of the Scientific Council of Berlin's Institute of Electronic Business at the time of his death.

In addition to his four daughters, survivors include a son; and five grandchildren.