The only word that separates humans from robots in the new minimal Turing test is not what you expect

The book Everybody is a fun way to teach kids the wonders of potty training, but the author may want to update it with a new subtitle after reading this new study. Two researchers from the Department of Brain Sciences and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and the University of Pennsylvania undertook to update the Turing Test, designed by computer scientist Alan Turing 68 years ago, to to make the difference between a human and a machine. To arrive at the new method, called "Minimal Turing Test", the researchers asked about 1,100 people to choose a word they would use to explain their humanity, and many of them chose "poo".

"We've come up with a new way to look at how people think about other types of agents, or people from other social groups." We asked people to give a word to prove that they did not are not smart robots and judge the words of others. We used natural language processing techniques to group the words of game theory. "The participants in the initial study also chose words like" love "and other things that relate only to human traits (religion, emotion, etc.), but during the second phase with a The researchers told the second group that the word associations presented to them came from humans and machines, even if they had all been submitted by humans, when asked to choose which word comes from there, the word "robot" was chosen most often as word machine, and the word "shit" was chosen more often as being derived from the man.

"Most words make sense once you see them, but they are not necessarily what I would have predicted in advance," said Tomer Ullman of MIT in an interview with Yahoo. "Some words still leave us head-over.The taboo category word beating all the rest is not something I'd bet much on before starting the study, even though it may seem obvious afterwards."

One would think that any "smart" machine would be better able to say the word robot, but maybe that is the reverse psychology and that's what they want us to think? Or maybe Alan Turing was a machine and that all this is a great thing to put us at ease before the takeover. Pooh.