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Of being human and other things

Repeating the correct pattern

Solving a simple equation

Identifying number of buses or boats or signal posts

Self-authorizing 


Can you guess the correlation between the 4 points mentioned above. Having already encountered one of them or the other daily, you might’ve realized already that these are nothing, but system checks to verify if the end user is a human being or not. There used to be a measure called as “Turing test” which evaluated a machine’s capability to replicate human responses. Key point being the evaluator was human, who must figure out which of his conversation partner was a system and which one is human. The results from those tests didn’t just border on right or wrong response but how closely the responses mimicked human behavior. Ironically, the machines are doing this verification nowadays to determine which of their users are human beings!! And more worrisome fact being, humans are mimicking machine-like responses. For example, couple of weeks back, there was a gruesome news on all TV channels about how a live-in relationship turned into an episode of “Dexter”, with the male spouse butchering the lady companion into several pieces, kept the body parts in a freezer and dispersed the parts one by one across several days, spread across several places. Just like how an AI tool, that relays similar interests or possible interest areas, based on our browsing pattern or online purchases, in the last couple of weeks, there has been at least half a dozen similar such domestic violence news have been aired all over the country. Every single day a new item comes up where in they quote the first incident and mention it as something similar that happened!!! For argument’s sake if one goes by the understanding that the first news item carried the highest TRP rating does that warranty the news vultures to seek similar such incidents and bring them to our living spaces? The argument for the other side could be what is stopping you from changing the channel!! When there is continuous bombardment of the same news across every channel that invariably operates 24/7, those news starved vultures harp on anything that may give them a TRP boost. Like movie industry where one hit on any given genre spawns several immediate ones with same or similar story lines. Sad thing being, such instances, the more they are displayed to common public, result in numbing the mind to the extent that, unless something every more gruesome happens, it becomes a mere statistic. Can’t really blame the machines, if they extrapolate the verification into evaluating the humanness on the end users in near future.

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