Turing Test

You know, I think one of the listservs in which I participate, for the moment, is being subject to a Turing test. A new poster to the list in recent weeks is providing over 50% of the content (some of which appears to promote a software company). He is taking a position on knowledge management which assumes that unless something is defined it has no value, that all knowledge resides in the brain and the only thing we can do is to manage information. Add a love for process, cost reduction at any cost, and we have a view of KM that most of us thought had died out years ago.

However I now have a new theory, the anal, highly structured nature of the response. The repetition of unsustainable points and the use of standard phrases from management text books; all of these indicate that we are not dealing with a human being, but with a computer that is analyzing the text and using a library to produce stock answers. Its the only explanation that works. The moderators rejected my current response (well its under negotiation) but I do hope it is a computer, the thought that there really is a human behind this worries me.