A couple of months ago Scott Horsley, an American reporter, challenged a computer to a race. A chain of diner restaurants had just published its quarterly results and the task was to write them up as a news story as quickly as possible. Horsley, fingers blurring, finished in a highly creditable seven minutes. WordSmith, an automated writing programme, took two.
The only resemblance between the computer’s copy and the Gettysburg Address may have been in the approximate number of words, but the impending dark night of humanity’s soul will be made up of hundreds of these bathetic little moments. A much more prominent one happened in Mayfair last summer. A piece of Russian software called Eugene Goostman, purporting to be a 13-year-old boy, narrowly passed