re: #205 Cato the Elder

The Turing Test has still not been passed.

One promise of AI all these years has been viable machine translation. Hasn’t happened yet and I don’t see it coming about anytime soon.

Thank God, or my last line of employment would be out the window.

Try copying this simple, readily understandable (to humans) message into Google Translations and getting the “German” version. Bring it back here and I’ll show you the dozen ways AI/machine translation can screw the pooch and jump the shark on a four-paragraph comment.

Don’t need to tell me that, I’ve had lots of experience chatting with a few friends I made in Brazil over the internet (long story). They don’t speak English and I don’t speak a lick of Portuguese so everything is done via Google Translate, most of the time I can grasp the gist of what they were saying but sometimes I’ll ask them to write their comments again in a different way to see if that translates out better.

Still cool though that two people who don’t share a language can comprehend about 90% of what the other says with the aid of an average house hold machine + internet connection.