intrust

If you call up the train station and ask them for a ticket for the next train to the moon¹ and the voice at the other end of the phone chuckles and asks if you will be needing a sleeping birth, you will probably assume that you are speaking with a thinking human, but if the same voice kindly informs you that she has trouble hearing what you are saying and asks if you perhaps meant Thenon, or Thamun, or Des Moines, then you might consider the possibility that you were talking to a non-thinking robot.

But you could be wrong. Since the alternative towns suggested in the latter alternative all lie on different continents, it is very unlikely that the second voice, if she was a robot, would have those destinations in her data bank; it might very well be a person spoofing you into thinking she was a machine just for fun. And since pranksters do call up travel agencies and ask for train tickets to the moon, it is quite possible that the first voice was actually a clever computer system that had learned to parry such an enquiry with a funny answer. You never know.²

Well whether you know or not doesn’t always matter and call centre personnel are not required to pass Turing tests, but that doesn’t matter either. The point is: did the interactive exchange work? Did you get your ticket to wherever you wanted to go? Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web has proposed the Semantic test, “which is passed if, when you give data to a machine, it will do the right thing with it."

Was the experience pleasurable? Sure that is important too, but that is another sort of Turing test. Could a rational observer discern which of two voices was pleasurable and which was not? I believe so – no matter if they were droid or human. We do get pleasure from cartoons, the figures of which are far closer related to anthropomorphic robots than people. Computer gamers apparently have no difficulty in getting jazzed up over Lara Croft’s extruding body parts.

// posted by Greg FitzPatrick @ 12:22