A friend of mine wants to write a program to play online poker. It would interact directly with the web interface (as a macro program on the desktop), and would thus be identical to a real human on the server side.
I’m a little concerned about this.
Creating synthetic online poker players only hastens the day when we have to deal with the simple fact that things are not as simple as we would like to believe. Someday, computer programs will be able to emulate all of the visible facets of being human. At that point it will be a matter of faith as to whether or not they *are* sentient like us.
Cheating at online poker is only the first step. Soon you’ll have mechanized cigar smoking, exotic dancer ogling lushes. Automated alcoholics. Automata panhandlers. Synthetic domestic abusers.
What space then for humanity?
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