The grassy knoll
Everybody loves a conspiracy. Even those who profess to hate them. They, of course, are part of the conspiracy. Obviously.
Who shot JFK? I for one have a perfect alibi; I wasn’t born yet. That, of course, will hardly convince the avid theorist.
We all wonder who really built the pyramids. Personally, my buck is on a time-traveling Elvis. Him and that John Wilkes Booth fellow, together with Michael Jackson’s nanny, financed by one of the co-founders of Google, and Michael Palin.
The human mind, I guess, is designed, geared toward the exotic, the unexpected. Throughout history our very survival has depended on an ability to, paradoxically, focus on the peripheral. Out there, on the grassy knoll, is where the danger lurks. The bluest of skies can one day produce a jet plane, thundering down toward the tower in mass-homicidal lunacy.
History doesn’t grind on as much as it sneezes and coughs, from one freak occurrence to the next. Modern-day paranoia simply ignites a psychological equivalent of the caveman’s bonfire, staving of saber-toothed cats and door-to-door salesmen. Add, perhaps, a pinch of boredom too.
Micky Mouse did it. The conspiracy theorist seems always to come astride a tricycle of caution, crying wolf, and, well, plain ridicule. A man more eloquent than me once famously said, “it’s not a question of whether or not you are paranoid, it’s are you paranoid enough?”
I am currently vacationing far away from that radiating epicenter of conspiracies called Jerusalem. Nonetheless I did stumble, serendipitously, on a kind of “That’s how that is” -revelation. This one begins June 23rd, 1912, the birth of Alain Mathison Turing.
During World War II the famous mathematician built an electromechanical device capable of deciphering the German Enigma machine, and in the late 1940’s, at the British National Physical Laboratory, he worked on a so-called Automatic Computing Engine, an ancient forerunner, if you will, of modern-day computers.
Today, more than fifty years after his death he is mostly famous, indeed revered, for the assertion that, one day, computers will be able in a text-based conversation, to mimic human intelligence, up to a point where the biological interlocutor cannot distinguish it from an actual person.
In a way the Turing benchmark has already been breached by so-called erotic text messaging services. At the far end of the virtual tether, a computer interprets the human dispatch, assembles a suitable response, adds a few random spelling mistakes to appear as fallible as its oxygen-breathing counterpart, and replies. Rarely anyone ever suspects foul play, if the whopping profits of these businesses are anything to go by.
Recently, some of the talkbacks and forum-drivel on various newspaper websites, especially on articles dabbling with Israeli-Palestinian mumbo-jumbo reminded me of a well-known fact; i.e. the urban myth that a lot of these blurbs are produced by freelance copywriters, paid for by interest groups. Or are they?
I venture, although pressed might not wager the proverbial farm, that a portion of these talkbacks are in fact produced by Turing-proof computers.
It’s the spelling mistakes, simply too random, that give away the spiel. Humans, especially the Anglophone variant who presumably reads the article upon which the commentary blubber is based, tend to slip up along predictable patterns. “Manichaeistic” is a lot harder, takes, in fact, a substantially larger amount of courage to spell than “bigot”, or “stupid”, even though the words roughly mean the same. And yet, the computer generates an equal amount of lapses in simple and difficult words alike.
That, I hear the protests, doesn’t prove a single, cotton-picking thing. Indeed it doesn’t, but hey, it’s a conspiracy theory. The burden of proof is not on me.
And yet… Allow me to elaborate. It shouldn’t be so difficult to devise an algorithm to establish, picking up certain keywords, a rough profile of a newspaper article. Then, in a rightwing Israeli version for instance, the talk-back program churns out a paragraph or two substituting Palestinians with Palls, proponents of negotiation with surrender-monkeys or self-haters, and criticism with anti-Semitism. Et voila.
Of course, it doesn’t take a conspiracy to explain twaddle, right- or leftwing, on the forums. Some people are incredibly dim, and alas, bored to tears. We needn’t a Warren commission or a Kevin Costner movie respectively to obscure or expose such a fact. Thank God. Why esteemed newspapers tolerate and indulge them is a different matter altogether.
Meanwhile, in 1952, Alain Turing ate an apple laced with cyanide. Did he kill himself? Was he murdered? And why? Does the Apple logo really refer to his untimely demise? Angela Lansburry is no longer among us to shed light on the matter.
All together now; how convenient…