Lessons from the very first chatbot

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of if then statements. I'm your friend David Pearce. And today on the show, we're talking about chatbots. Specifically, the very first chatbot from the nineteen sixties. It was called Eliza. And the way to think about it is basically as a very simple back and forth experience that you might have with a computer. One of the first instantiations of Eliza was this thing called doctor, which would play therapist for you. And it would ask you how you were doing, and you would respond and you'd say, I'm having a bad day. And it would go through and look for specific keywords and ways that you responded and respond back to you. And it was able to carry on a pretty functional conversation. It remembered things about you, it could ask questions, it could move things along, it could make connections. It wasn't very sophisticated, just a few 100 lines of code, but it worked. It was so effective that it convinced a lot of people that there had to be a human on the other end. It was a fascinating product made by some fascinating people and a group of academics and researchers and writers recently has excavated all of the source code of Eliiza and they've written a book called Inventing Eliiza about where it came from, who created it, and the lessons it might have for us in the current world of AI. Because spoiler alert, there are a lot of them. And the way that we think about computers really hasn't changed that much since the nineteen sixties. It's gonna be very fun. I'm really excited to dig into it. But first, here's everything else happening on the Verge today. This is ninety seconds on the Verge for Tuesday, 08/11/2026. Have you ever wondered why your Amazon emails are so unhelpful? They just say, like, your wireless accessory is confirmed instead of giving you anything useful or specific? Well, Diverge's Miyasada wondered too, and she found out that it's all about AI data. Basically, if Amazon puts your orders in the email, suddenly Gmail knows what you're buying, which means Gemini can do a better job of steering you to stuff you like on Google Shopping. Amazon says it's also about privacy and convenience, but this is a company that is also fighting perplexity and others to keep AI agents from taking over any of your shopping experience. Because it's very important to Amazon that you go to amazon.com and accidentally click on a bunch of barely labeled ads. That's the business. Meanwhile, David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount, has reportedly decided to move his company out of California if the state's attorney general refuses to settle the antitrust case challenging Paramount's acquisition, Warner Brothers Discovery. This is all obviously a threat. The case isn't set to go to court until next March, and Paramount will start owing shareholders about $7,000,000 a day this October. …