Opening Lines

POOR Robots. There’s always such pressure on them.

Approximately once a month, there’s a story that indicates that they are always either seen as the answer to all our prayers or the harbingers of the end of the human employment. They’re not asking for this attention. All they want to do is get on with their work and get a bit of lubricating oil every now and then.

Last week it was claimed that a computer program managed to convince enough people that it was human to pass what is known as the Turing Test. The program had the persona of a 13-year old boy from Odessa in Ukraine called Eugene Goostman. More 30% of people who chatted with Eugene online thought they were talking to a human.