Human evolution lurched ahead the other day, leaving Homo sapiens in the same dust that covers the Neanderthals and other dead branches on the tree of life.
Meet the future: Eugene Goostman. He’s a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy; his father is a gynecologist and he owns a gerbil. (Eugene, that is, not his father.)
He’s also not a real boy, but a computer program. A chatbot, to be precise.
But this assemblage of hopped up bits and bytes managed to fool some real humans into believing he was one of us, thereby passing the legendary milestone of artificial intelligence known as the Turing Test, proposed by the British mathematician Alan Turing as a way of telling the difference between humans and computers.
In 1950, Turing predicted that in 50 years a machine would be able to fool at least 30 per cent of interrogators into thinking they were talking to a human being. Well, it took a little bit longer than 50 years (64 to be precise), but Eugene fooled 10 out of 30 judges last week at the University of Reading.
There was an immediate outcry that Eugene was a trick, that his programmers intentionally programmed him to be a boy, which would explain his knowledge gaps. Computers, for example, never make spelling mistakes, which gives them away. They’re too intelligent in some ways, artificial or not.
Whatever the flaws in the test or the program, the point is that Eugene managed to fool some of the people in the room. This doesn’t surprise me. As computers are getting smarter, I swear people are getting dumber. If you need evidence, just check this recent Buzzfeed piece: The 35 Dumbest Things That Have Ever Happened, in which real people incisively demonstrate their inferiority:
“Just found out my birthday is the same day as when I was born! Life is crazy!”
Or:
“Where’s the 2014 Brazil World Cup going to be held?”
Or:
“wow, I can’t believe the titanic sunk and the people filming it didn’t even stop to help ”
I could go on, but you get the idea.
No wonder Eugene Goostman sounds like a real boy. It ain’t nothin’ special.
Yeah, it’s a little creepy getting overtaken by Little Boy Blue. But maybe it’s not so bad. My phone tells me that right now, it would take me 29 minutes to drive home. That’s the word it uses. Home. Like we both live there.
When Siri first did that, I admit to being touched. Not only did she/it suggest we go home, she gave me precise, accurate directions. It had been a long day. I was tired. I was just glad somebody…or something…knew the way.