One of the books I am currently reading is “An Introduction to Neural Networks“. The introductory chapter covered the Turing Test and the fact that no computer has ever come close to passing it. The context of the chapter was about the limitations of the computer to house and efficiently access a db of human knowledge in order to answer the questions as a human would.
A thought occurred to me. Are humans becoming more computer-like in the way we interact with each other? In this day and age, many of us interact with computers more than we do with humans. I’m doing it write now as I write this. We gain a great deal of our knowledge as a result of direct contact with computer systems and much of our ‘human to human’ interaction are proxied through computer systems (twitter, IM, email, etc) and we adapt our language on those systems accordingly.
For instance, a human could ask another human:
“Hey Sam, are you attending OSCON this year?”
The equivilent tweet might be:
“@samkeen are you attending #oscon2009″
And some line of computer code might be:
if(samkeen.attending(‘oscon2009′)) {
#take some action;
}
From this you could conclude that the Tweet syntax is bridging the gap between programming code and human dialogue.
If it is true that the way we attain, and share knowledge is becoming more computer-like, will that not someday allow a computer system to pass the Turing Test. Or in that case would it be the human passing the Turing Test?
