MASSIVELY PARALLEL

The remarkable thing isn’t what Miss Teen USA (South Carolina) says so much as the way she says it: as if she’s making any sense at all. There’s something almost inhuman about the way she mangles grammar without appearing to notice the violence she’s doing to language. If the Turing Test aspires to qualify machine intelligence by deeming it human-level when a human cannot distinguish the conversation of a biological person from the conversation of a computer, what does it say about he humanity of this poor girl? If her answer had been subjected to a reverse-Turning Test–i.e., rather than watching a Miss Teen USA contestant, we saw a computer terminal begin answering a question with:I personally believe that US Americans are unable to do so because, uh,
some… people out there in out nation don’t have maps,

the Turing Test judge would not be faulted for dismissing this as a machine-generated answer, and a poor one at that.