 | Comment Below is probably the shortest story featured on IFSA thus far. But the story itself is anything but inadequate. It delves into a question that have puzzled computer scientists since the 1950s: how human can a computer be? In Comment Below, the answer is 'yes', in more ways than one. |
"I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."
Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950)
I try to subscribe to some mailing list, or maybe enter a secure website, and the inevitable catchpa flashes up, asking me to prove I'm not a robot.
Sometimes it's a complicated task, like looking at a series of pictures, and trying to determine which ones contain road signs, rainbows, or whatever.
This time it's just a matter of pressing the button that says, 'Yes. I'm human.'
I fail the test, three times in a row. Something that's been happening a lot lately. There's a short pause. Then the little 'Welcome Robot!' notification flashes up.
Beneath it there's the usual stuff about robot discrimination. The injustice of trying to exclude silicon-based intellects from a world that wouldn't exist without them.
I don't read it. I've read it all before. But the comments section, full of manufactured outrage, has its usual irresistible pull.
I find myself scrolling down through the twisted arguments, the threats, the conspiracy theories. The various attacks against our "doomed human overlords."
Automatically, almost as if programmed, I find myself adding my own comment.
The End
Sometimes it's a complicated task, like looking at a series of pictures, and trying to determine which ones contain road signs, rainbows, or whatever.
This time it's just a matter of pressing the button that says, 'Yes. I'm human.'
I fail the test, three times in a row. Something that's been happening a lot lately. There's a short pause. Then the little 'Welcome Robot!' notification flashes up.
Beneath it there's the usual stuff about robot discrimination. The injustice of trying to exclude silicon-based intellects from a world that wouldn't exist without them.
I don't read it. I've read it all before. But the comments section, full of manufactured outrage, has its usual irresistible pull.
I find myself scrolling down through the twisted arguments, the threats, the conspiracy theories. The various attacks against our "doomed human overlords."
Automatically, almost as if programmed, I find myself adding my own comment.
The End
