Is Every Day Now Eliza Doolittle Day?

With the idiots of the media abuzz with talk of chatbots for over a year now (we can seem to be going from "The Singularity is Near!" to "The Singularity is Here!"), some have bothered to look into the history of the technology in however clumsy a way, and in the process reminded those who had forgotten (and informed those who never knew) of the fact that the first chatbot, created way back in 1964, was named ELIZA--after the then-recent hit stage and film musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, My Fair Lady.

At one point in the play Eliza, amid the rigors of her training in elocution, has a daydream in which, Eliza a celebrated figure in society, the King of England proclaims an "Eliza Doolittle Day," in which "All the people will celebrate the glory of you . . ."

So it has gone this past year--every day seeing the "glory" of what the still-skeptical see as a mere autocomplete talked up by Silicon Valley types longer on hucksterism than their highly touted "INNOVATION!" in their turn talked up by their (to use a politer word than they deserve) courtiers in the press, inflating a new technological bubble here, because that is pretty much all that anyone does these days, after which it may all well pass into obscurity.