Go Ask ALICE

When we were in high school, TPoMS and I (and possibly Our Man Of Toast — Jon, I’m changing your name, this is just more fun to say) took a class where all we had to do was surf the Interwebs. Seriously, that’s all we did.

In fact, it was such a joke that our teacher quit mid-semester and was replaced by a permanent substitute who happened to be a former weatherman and also a coke addict. Once, I caught him looking at porn in class but didn’t tell anyone because I figured that if I had to watch kids use the Internet all day, I’d probably also stare blindly at porn just to pass the time.

Some time after that semester he would go back to star on the local news although in a completely different way — by attempting to rob a grocery store with a screwdriver in order to get drug money. Hooray for public schools!

Either way, we liked him well enough because we didn’t have to do anything and he gave us neat little projects to search for like the Gutenberg Project and ALICE, an AI builder that would make you respond to questions so that it could learn how to respond to questions and situations. You could answer however you wanted (usually in multiple choice formats) and make ALICE as morally superior or bankrupt as you wanted. This being high school and all we usually chose the latter.

Why do I bring this up when I haven’t thought of ALICE in years? Do you remember in one of the very first episodes of Futurama when Bender starts talking about robosexuals?

Well apparently, one guy has been trying to make that fantasy a reality and has kind of succeeded. And he used ALICE’s brain to do it! You can read the Gizmodo interview here and it’s a little NSFW so peruse at your own risk. However, it’s still a good read and end up almost feeling for the guy at the end of it so if you’ve got some time to kill, take a gander.