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[ 2 Comments ]Posted on September 4, 2009 by admin in Technology
Friday, September 4th, 2009
Dissociated Press is being run by an artificial intelligence today. Go ahead and talk to it.
More than one person has suggested that my writing could easily be replicated with a fairly small number of monkeys with typewriters, and that Dissociated Press could be replaced with automated link aggregator software. I can’t afford any monkeys, and offhand, I don’t know how to program a link aggregator, so I’ve decided an artificial intelligence would suffice. And I promise it’s not a Russian Flirtbot. Today, YOU are writing the content, and the site will talk back to you. Maybe not all that intelligently, but how smart a web site do you expect at the price you’re paying. I mean, 99.6% of you don’t even click on the ads! Have a nice chat:
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on July 26, 2009 by admin in Technology
Sunday, July 26th, 2009
The human race. It’s what’s for dinner.
Great. Not only does the Internet eat all our time, now it’s going to start eating us. We treat the idea of a self-aware Internet as science fiction that only exists in the form of the Terminator
franchise’s Skynet or old 70′s movies like Colossus – The Forbin Project
. Personally though, I’ve been saying to friends for a while that the Internet already is self-aware. It’s controlling our time and modifying our behaviour slowly and subtly, by forcing us into social networking, mobile devices, and pornography. Sure. Go ahead and convince yourself that it was your personal volition that turned you into an ADD-afflicted, Facebook-obsessed, Tivo-ing, CrackBerry textaholic, but I’m convinced the Internet is slowly training us to communicate in its preferred mode – text and images. And apparently I’m not too crazy for pondering this line of thought. Two respected scientists in this NewScientist article say that a self-aware Internet may already exist, and there was recently a serious scientific summit addressing the concern that machines may soon outsmart man. Combine this with the fact that military researchers are developing corpse-eating robots (which of course the company involved immediately denied, claiming they’re vegetarians) and you have some pretty scary scenarios brewing, even if they seem a little silly at the moment. Read the rest of this entry »
[ 4 Comments ]Posted on October 16, 2008 by admin in Technology
Thursday, October 16th, 2008
The high cost of flunking the Turing Test
As I’ve mentioned before, seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey
at the age of seven warped my mind in several ways. One effect was that I refused to learn how to use a PC until 1999, when it was rapidly becoming evident that they weren’t becoming more conversational any time soon. Although researchers are trying hard to create convincing artificial intelligence, the best they’ve accomplished recently is 25% on the Turing Test . And I’m assuming, after exchanging a few words with Elbot, the AI in question, that the test subjects were a bit dim-witted. Which makes it especially amusing that there’s a Russian Flirtbot that’s extracting personal information from chatroom users by establishing up to 10 relationships in 30 minutes. Sadly, knowing what I know about men, it probably is some pretty easily-generated dialog, like: “Ooh baby, you’re making me so hot! What’s that username and password again?” As an example of how stupid you’d have to be to give your information to a chatbot, try talking to Alice, with whom I had the following exchange:
ME: Hi Alice. ALICE: Hello there. ME: Are you a Russian flirt bot? ALICE: Am I a Russian flirt bot? Yes.
ME: How would you go about securing my usernames and passwords? Read the rest of this entry »
