I just finished reading Marc Parry's profile of Jonathan Haidt in the Chronicle of Higher Education. To see if the piece was missing anything obvious, I perused some of the comments.
Back-and-forths between allegedly conservative and allegedly liberal commenters in online fora all follow a depressingly familiar pattern. Conservatives are caricatured as heartless, selfish bastards (and presumably bitches) and/or blindly obedient dupes of authority. Liberals are caricatured as delusional busybodies without a scintilla of real-world experience who lust after unfettered federal power to remake the nation along the lines of what they're irrationally convinced is their morally and intellectually superior vision.
The remarks by supposedly flesh-and-blood human beings are so predictable, I wouldn't be surprised to find that software has been masquerading as at least some of the people in these exchanges for some time -- that is, that a sophisticated (but not necessarily "smart") program and its creator have been subjecting us to a real-life Turing test. If so, kudos to the creator; now could you please stop?
Sometimes I'm disheartened enough by online political commentary to wonder if, rather than a Turing test, we're witnessing a large-scale conversation between dueling instances of Eliza instead.
No comments:
Post a Comment