“A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.” - A.Turing

To start the year, I've been knee-deep in reviewing marketing campaigns. One of my mantras is "let's not guess." It takes time to find and dig out something close to hard evidence. However, if we take the time to do it now, even if we don't find exactly what we're looking for, we can set it up to make sure don't have the same problem next year.
Little bits of progress today to keep tomorrow's momentum going.
One of the exercises I did was review search engine searches. As you may know, when we run ads on Google, we bid on the search terms we think prospects might use. What you might not know is advertisers get to see exactly what these people typed in. You don't get to see 100% of the terms, but you get enough for a feel of how non-insiders might ask questions on Google. (such as when people use terms like "who, what, where, when, why, question, if, should, can, do, etc." in their search) It's a great brainstorming tool and, when it comes to learning more about how prospects think, it helps.
As we go through the process and I look through thousands of lines of searches, one thing sticks out. The searches are phrased in a particular way. It used to be in this exercise we'd see funny searches. The kind that makes you wonder if the person doing the search knows how a search engine works. Now, I see far fewer.
One reason could be that Google is suppressing those searches from my reporting tool, but another possibility is stuck in my head.
The machine is training us.
The Turing test is a machine's ability to exhibit human intelligence, but how human is it to interact in a browser via short text notes? How far away are Alicia Vikander Ex Machina type machine interfaces? Will the robots even need to get to that point? We seem pretty willing to adapt our behavior to far simpler interfaces.
At the point where my thoughts start to drift, I remember the Progressive "don't be like your parents" commercial. The one where he says, "This is a status bar, not a search bar," and shows where someone typed their social media status as "recipe for pot roast."
We're probably a long way from Ava.
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