This call may be recorded....

If you're into computers, and particularly computer programming, you've probably heard of the Turing test. Alan Turing was one of the geniuses at Bletchley Park during the war, and he later laid down a test for artificial intelligence (AI). If, he said, you were carrying out a text-based conversation with (unknown to you) a computer in another room, and you couldn't tell that it wasn't human, then that computer (or more precisely, its program) would pass his test for AI. Apparently there is an annual competition to see whether any computer program can pass the test. As yet, the answer would seem to be "getting close but no", but one expert confidently predicted that the Turing test would be passed within the next two or three years. He saw this as leading, among other things, to computers taking over from humans in call-centres. You mean, that hasn't already happened - that really is a human being I'm talking to and getting no sense out of?