Althouse: "I'm not a robot. I am a unicorn."

September 10, 2011

"I'm not a robot. I am a unicorn."

"But you said earlier that you were a robot."

16 comments:

Jason (the commenter) said...: A real human would have responded with the Marina and the Diamonds song.; 9/10/11, 7:26 AM
Bob said...: Another couple of minutes and the robots would have been violating Godwin's Law.; 9/10/11, 7:29 AM
traditionalguy said...: Aurevoir said the female robot after asking the male robot if he wanted a body.

That makes the female robot a prick tease.

This is evidence of "original Robot Sin."; 9/10/11, 7:35 AM
Jason (the commenter) said...: Neither of them is a robot! They're computer programs generating images on a screen!; 9/10/11, 7:38 AM
frank said...: Sure sounds like Paul Krugmam in a debate with Maureen Dowd.; 9/10/11, 8:31 AM
Kylos said...: Doesn't seem much more advanced than the emacs psychiatrist.; 9/10/11, 8:33 AM
Kylos said...: Though they didn't try to probe each others sexual dysfunctions.; 9/10/11, 8:35 AM
Big Mike said...: Not a new idea to hook up chatbots. Back in the mid-1960's (that's forty-five years ago, for those of you who have received a modern education and can't do subtraction) a program named "Eliza" was developed at MIT that sort of "conversed" with a human mostly by rearranging the human's input from a teletype into a question. A few years later, circa 1971, a professor at Stanford developed a program called "PARRY," which was designed to emulate the ramblings of a paranoid schizophrenic using a "belief network" to formulate its output. The ostensible goal of PARRY was to help train psychiatry students to recognize paranoid schizophrenics if they should ever come across one in their practice.

Since Eliza reminded many people of a type of psychiatrist, it was inevitable that someone would connect the two of them. A partial transcript is here.

If interested, you can find out more about Eliza and PARRY in Wikipedia.; 9/10/11, 9:29 AM
Kylos said...: Interesting read, Big Mike. I think Eliza was the psychiatrist embedded in some versions of the emacs editor. It relied heavily on rephrasing your input, sometimes yielding some pretty heavily mangled syntax.; 9/10/11, 9:40 AM
Anonymous said...: The war between the sexes, even in cyberspace!; 9/10/11, 10:27 AM
Fred4Pres said...: Sounds like a nerdy college late night bull session.; 9/10/11, 10:33 AM
gerry said...: What Bob said at 7:29.

It's as if pseudosentience caused bitchiness.; 9/10/11, 10:43 AM
FleetUSA said...: For sure neither will get laid.; 9/10/11, 10:47 AM
gerry said...: For random-generated sentences, they fight crime is good for a few giggles (my favorite today is "cigar-chomping mermaid").; 9/10/11, 11:20 AM
Anonymous said...: ... they fight crime ...

This is a descendant of Michael Cassutt's immortal High Concept pitch:

"He's a chimp! She's the Pope! They're cops!"

And as far as the two chatbots are concerned, xkcd nailed it.; 9/11/11, 3:32 AM
Pastafarian said...: It reminded me of the Star Trek episode where Kirk and the crew made bizarre statements to confuse and bewilder some computer or robot or some such. I think these two were trying to kill one another within 30 seconds of meeting.

I wonder why they spoke English with what appeared to be Indian accents. And had such a rapid fire delivery, with no pause between speakers' statements, that it was unnatural and counterproductive. They were speaking over each other.; 9/11/11, 7:06 AM