The Auslander Test: or, ‘Of Bots and Humans’

AbstractIn ‘Live from Cyberspace: Or, I was sitting at my computer this guy appeared he thought I was a bot’, Philip Auslander asserts that there is a ‘crisis’ created by the invention of new digital technologies. Herbert Blau responds to Auslander in ‘The Human Nature of the Bot’. At the crux of the debate is the following question: is performance a specifically human activity? The digital technology that has precipitated this crisis, the chatterbot, is a type of computer program developed to mimic human response via words typed and viewed at a computer terminal. The first of these programs was Eliza, developed at MIT as an attempt to solve the ‘The Turing Test’, conceived by computer science pioneer Alan M. Turing. A Turing Test is said to be successful when the human interrogator cannot tell the difference between the human and the mechanical source. In the early 1970s, Joseph Weizenbaum's Doctor program was paired up with Kenneth Colby's programme Parry, a program that simulates a paranoid schizophren...