sounded kind of wonderful. “A number of practicing psychiatrists seriously believed the DOCTOR computer program could grow into a nearly completely automatic form of therapy,” Weizenbaum wrote. “I had thought it essential, as a prerequisite to the very possibility that one person might help another cope with his emotional problems, that the helper himself participate in the other’s experience.” To use a machine for such a task? He was horrified. Weizenbaum knew the empathy ELIZA was exuding was faked. It was just code. “Science,” he concluded, “has been gradually converted into a slow-acting poison.” “Would you mind leaving the room,” Weizenbaum’s secretary said to him once, lost in a particularly personal discussion with ELIZA. “The reaction,” he wrote, “showed me more clearly than anything I had seen hitherto the enormously exaggerated attributions even a well-educated audience is capable of making, even strives to make, to a technology it does not understand.” This was black boxing at its worst: “I have no idea how this thing works. And it’s wonderful!” What makes the New Caste so particularly powerful is that their essential work is to build and operate the cores that control these systems. And the more people they lure onto them, the more powerful the platforms - and the people who run them - become. “The computer programmer,” Weizenbaum wrote, summing up his lessons from ELIZA, “is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver.” Each of these cores represents a fusion of power and politics and technology like nothing the world has ever seen. They are assembled mostly from scratch, they represent the concentration of billions of connections, and their direction is determined by technological and market factors as much as by any democratic twitch. The strategic power of societies that train the best of the New Caste is probably self- evident by now. To educate and deploy masses of people capable of such transcendent design genius will mark a differen