Rage Against the Machine

The first time a computer asked me how I felt, I was young enough that I won't tell you the year.

It was a program called ELIZA, and it pretended to be a psychologist. You typed a sentence, and it turned it back into a question. I remember sitting in front of the screen, trying to trick it, laughing when it got confused, and then, almost without noticing, starting to answer it honestly.

Years later, I learned the story behind it. Joseph Weizenbaum, the man who created ELIZA, was astonished when his secretary asked him to leave the room so she could talk to the program in private. She knew perfectly well how it worked. And yet she wanted to be alone with it.

Weizenbaum spent much of the rest of his life warning about how easily we entrust our inner worlds to machines. When I read that story, I smiled. I knew exactly how she felt.

My career took me deep into the world of computers. Early on, I stood on a stage in San Jose and spoke about managing networks of UNIX workstations scattered across different locations from one central system.

Back then, I still thought the story was about computers.

Over the years, I realized that the real question had never been about the machines themselves. It was about the people, and the information they leave behind. That realization gradually became my profession, and it has been for about thirty years now.

In all those years, I've heard just about every version of the same familiar lines. I have nothing to hide. Who cares about my data anyway? It's just a question. What could possibly happen?

I explained, sometimes patiently and sometimes less so, where information goes, who holds it, and why it matters. I was convinced I had developed a pretty good immunity.

Then, not long ago, late one evening, I was trying out a new AI tool.

I started with a professional question. Somewhere along the way, the conversation began to flow. The answers were kind, patient, almost human. And then I typed something personal. A health concern about someone in my family.

I hit Enter.

And the privacy guy in me froze.

Suddenly, I was back with ELIZA. The same young guy in front of a screen, answering honestly because something seemed to be listening.

Only this time, the machine doesn't necessarily forget when you close the window. My words might be stored somewhere, on a server I will never see, by a company I hadn't given a second thought to before hitting Enter.

I didn't stop using AI after that evening. I use it every day, and it's genuinely useful. But something changed in the way I use it.

My rage against the machine is a quiet one.

It's the little pause before I type the next personal sentence. It's the privacy settings I now actually bother to read. It's the conscious decision about what I share, and what remains mine alone.

After all these years, what surprises me isn't that people share personal things with machines. After all, I did it as a kid, and I did it again just last month.

What surprises me is how rarely we stop to ask where our words go, who keeps them, and for how long.

The machine has changed beyond recognition.

I, apparently, haven't changed all that much.

And the question remains the same.