ICA-CP: Question of the Week due 4/3/2009

[The Question of the Week is due on Friday, 4/3/2009 by 5:00 PM. It should be at least 250 words in length. Include two research links that lend support to your answer. ]

Background: Google turned on CADIE yesterday. Cadie is an artificial intelligence computer program capable of creating her own web site. For Cadie's "birth" announcement, posted a second before midnight, see this link: http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/cadie/index.html
To see Cadie's web site that she herself designed, go here: http://cadiesingularity.blogspot.com/ See Cadie's YouTube videos here: http://www.youtube.com/cadiesingularity Part of Cadie is a chatterbot. For info on chatterbots, here's a link: http://knol.google.com/k/william-wynn/chatterbot/3fegkfxlkmrqb/2# You can use Cadie to answer your email automatically through a feature called Autopilot. The link to Autopilot is here: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/autopilot/index.html. There is also a reference to Eliza at that link. Cadie is supposed to be better than Eliza at passing the Turing test, a test for "humanness."


Question(s): If you did not know Cadie was a program, and the only contact you had was through the Internet, would you think that Cadie is human (maybe a young kid)? Based on your experience with Cadie, do you think artificial intelligence programs will act as if the were fully human in the future? (Support your answer with at least two research links.) If yes, what is to prevent governments from giving them citizenship rights? What is to prevent Cadie from taking over the Internet? (Or, is this all just an April Fool's day joke? Discuss the intricacies of online April's Fool's Day jokes, with google in particular, if that's your conclusion.)