sst-0511

Socialism – the word invented in the late 1810s, communism – the word first appeared in 1840. None of these things were words, much less ideologies before the French Revolution and the French revolution gives birth to much of the modern political world. Have you not wondered why we refer to the political left, and the political right? Does this have any inherent bodily signification? No. Left and right in politics comes from the original designation of the Deputies who sat to the Left of the speaker’s, podium and those who sat to the right of the speaker’s podium in the National assembly of 1789-1790. The left were those who were seen as progressive wanting to change, the right were seen as those wanting to conserve elements of the old regime.

British computer scientist Alan Turing shifted the focus of artificial intelligence questions by proposing a simpler one: can a computer converse like a human? In his 1950 paper, he introduced the Turing test, where a human judge interacts with unseen players to determine if a computer can convincingly mimic human responses. Turing predicted machines would pass by 2000, but he may have been overly optimistic.