Man or Machine

By Rose Jacobs. Many people talk about becoming a different person in a foreign language—funnier or bolder or more suave. What they don’t mention is that, on the way, you become a computer. That’s what struck me last month when reading about “Eugene Goostman,” the first machine to pass the Turing Test, by convincing 10 of 30 judges that it was a human based on a five-minute, instant-message conversation. More...