Passing the Turing Test

Bow uses smart technology all the time. He swipes to select photos.

He watches recorded livestreams to see what I and his friend Charla have been up to while away from the pens.

He is a big fan of Lady Gaga, who excites him. But he watches Julie Andrews respectfully and quietly while she delivers a speech on the history of musical theater.

Bow has logged countless hours watching YouTube videos -- countless because they cannot be counted by the internet  bots, since Bow does not have his own account. They cannot tell if I am the one watching or Bow is. Because of this, they totally ignore the chimpanzee demographic when pitching ad space to advertisers. It seems sad that Bow's opinions and preferences should not be tallied along with everyone else's, but then I have to remind myself that there are plenty of humans who watch YouTube and whose opinions also do not count. Not everybody has a YouTube account. Many watch, but not only do they not subscribe -- there's no way that they could subscribe. And YouTube, trying to corner all the big spenders in Gen Z need to know exactly who you are in order to count your vote. Or so they think.

Livestram with Julia
https://youtu.be/KFUqOf_dmXQ
and
https://youtu.be/5Fv8UFCQGT8

But that's not really how the free market operates. The market does not need to know who paid for the bananas. It just counts how many bananas were sold, and what price they went for. Does it matter if the person watching is not human or not an adult or not a voter?

Back in the day, when I started Project Bow, I was hoping that one day, when Bow was literate and on the internet in total anonymity, he would pass the Turing test. I noted that we as humans had brains that are wired in a variety of different ways, and yet we use the same languages to communicate with one another.

We don't just anthropomorphize chimpanzees when we ascribe to them the thoughts and feelings  we would have had under the same circumstances. We do the same to our fellow man. No two brains are alike. No two have the same wiring diagram for processing language.

When I wrote the article embedded above, I was attending a conference at Dartmouth, and Sword and Bow and I were staying in rented house in Canaan, New Hampshire.

With us was the first Project Bow intern, Samina Farooqi. Since then, Samina has gotten her Ph.D, Sword has graduated from high school and is a freshman in college, and Bow is about to turn sixteen. Bow is a member of Gen Z, computer literate and internet savvy. But his input doesn't count, because he is not a subscriber.

I liked it better when the anonymity of the internet gave everyone a chance at passing the Turing test no matter who they were, how they were wired or whether they had a Google account .