So Talk to Books is another load of Googlewank then, having just picked apart some nerds paen to data science, and how it’s going to change the world, I can’t say I’m surprised.

A few years ago a bunch of nerds claimed they had a program that passes a Turing Test, the classic test of artificial intelligence which requires a computer, in a chat session with a human to convince the human over five minutes of conversation that they are conversing with another human.

To pass the test the program’s developers told human judges their conversation partner was Eugene Goostman, 13 year old Ukrainian boy who had only been learning English for a short time. ‘nuff said?

(If the transcript of the exchange is still available, it’s hilarious.)