[extropy-chat] Noisy future day (was: silent night)

[Brett Paatsch]

Spike wrote:

> What was the name we decided on last time this came up?

> It was the name of the class of typos that spell a different
> word, so that a spell checker would not notice or object.  
> I am particularly interested in these, for you may recall 
> my concern for emergent AI, which would learn of humans from 
> the most immediately and readily available source of information 
> to an AI: internet chat archives.  

I do recall the conversation. Which I am glad of, as I forget lots
of stuff and its good to remember sometimes, but, also not so 
glad of, because I'm making the same mistakes when I try and 
type fast to keep conversational flows in something like real 
time. 
 
> Any computer program would be really good and fast at
> looking up unfamiliar words, but would perhaps be poor at
> recognizing things that our human minds grasp so easily, 
> such as the words gambolling and gambling sound alike, and 
> so are often mistakenly interchanged.  To a machine that
> does not hear speech, but only read, the words gambolling
> and gambling are not strikingly similar.
> 
> In the (very silly) 1986 movie Short Circuit, an emergent
> AI learned about humanity by watching TV and reading thru 
> Ally Sheedy's collection of books (back in the days when
> she was still wildly babe-alicious.)  In 1986 they had
> no foresight regarding an internet. 
> 
> The emergent AI will be so puzzled, I fear, by this class of
> error that it may decide to demerge back into ordinary
> software, all because of the class of typos in which no
> actual spelling or grammatical errors occur, yet the resulting
> sentence means something completely different from that which 
> was intended.
> 
> What did we call that last time?

Its a homophone, rather than a homonym? Same sound, (or nearly),
different spelling.

If I recall, last time I thought it was a homonym and Olga pointed
out it was a homophone. But I'm not certain.

Brett