PC, anyone?
The absurdity of political correctness:
“I’m not retarded anymore.”
“Oh, really?”
“Really. I went from retard to challenge - who knows what I’ll be next!”
(from the House of D movie trailer)
Archive for February 19th, 2005
Californian Kids Fail Turing Test
Researchers at the IBM Almaden Research Facility have developed a computer program, Maisy 5, that has foiled testers into thinking it is human. But not because it’s so clever — the Californian kids it was tested against were too stupid:
“Well, what’s happened here is not that the computers got smarter - the people got dumber,” said computer science professor Henrietta DeMarcos.
[...]
“I was sure that only a poorly-designed program could be so incoherent and moronic,” said one of the judges in the study, referring to one of the human participants. “I mean, they couldn’t even spell right. I thought perhaps the program had a virus or something and was possibly a Microsoft project. The Maisy program seemed downright civilized and intelligent by comparison.”
The following quote really got me dumbstruck, though:
Maisy 5 has already attracted the attention of the Pentagon, which says it is interested in using the software in robotic soldiers currently under development.
“Frankly, we don’t care if the system only looks good in comparison to California kids,” said Pentagon spokesperson Charles Beringer. “Remember that we get recruits from California too. This would be a step up no matter what.”
