I belong to a mailing list for fans of recording artist Beck (you know, that “Loser” guy; check out his new album, it rocks). All of us are big fans that have every one of his albums, including a rare early disc called “Sterepathetic Soul Manure”.
Here’s where the mass hallucination comes in. It seems that fully ninety-percent of us on the board (in excess of a hundred people) misread the word “StereoPATHETic” as “StereoPATHIC”. Now, what the heck is up with that? How could all of us fall victim to the same false title? Any thoughts?
It stands for Artificial Intelligence Phone. It’s a phone which tries to fool you into thinking you’ve actually reached a person, but you’re really just talking to a computer with voice recognition software. The computer is programmed to respond just like a person. This is someones test for when a program is intelligent; if no one can tell the difference then the program is intelligent (I don’t buy that, but some people do).
Try it some time, it’s very well done. You’d swear you were really talking to a person, not a computer.
Yeah, until they say something no human would be stupid enough to say, like: “we can’t accept your credit card with a billing address in Hawaii. We accept only U.S. credit cards.”