Do we need a Turing Test for humans? Given the pervasive presence of AI in our lives are we ourselves adapting to suit AI’s ways? Might this begin to explain our seemingly growing discomfort with human to human communication?
Adapt or perish? Charles Darwin probably had no idea of the technological change that would befall our environment – but he knew that life, in all its forms, selected for traits that ensured its survival in prevailing conditions. More recently the concept of epigenetic development has become widely accepted as the likely method through which such rapid-response, event-driven evolution can take place.
So are the offspring of our recent ‘Digital’ generations already adapted to think and communicate only in technology oriented ways? Will we lose(have we already lost) the ability to communicate with other humans – i.e. empathetically and nuanced?
Should we even be concerned by our apparent willingness to adapt to the needs of AI technology. Is AI already our new master?
Our apparent enthusiasm for text message communication (with or without emojis) suggests that we value transactional communications over unstructured conversations. How then are we to know if the other party is a human – and that cuts both ways!
There may well come a time when we need to be able to prove that we really are human – and not just to some website subscription service that is attempting to block ‘bots’. We may want to communicate with another human!