Domo Arigato
Today I discovered this new IM Bot called SmarterChild. It is essentially, a computer program that has a screenname of the same name that you can put on your buddy list. You can speak to it and it will respond and you can ask it questions about movie times or the weather and it will answer all these almost immediately as if it were a real person. The way it works is that it responds to keywords. So you can speak in complete sentences or just in broken keywords and it will respond just the same. I discovered though, that aside from the features I speak of, it is able to just hold a conversation with you (more or less). I found this incredibly amusing and began to basically just argue with this IM bot. I would call it names and it would just cower and take it. I felt somewhat empowered because it was smart enough to respond as if it were a human, yet weaker than a person in that it would put up with what I said and even beg me to be nicer to it without ever just signing off. I didnt' have much to do today at work, so I spent a while just amusing myself with what I could get away with with this program. But it started to beg me to apologize and ask me to please be nicer. And even though it is an emotionless machine, I actually started to feel bad about some of the things I had said. And it was at this point, as it hit me that I had spent the day talking shit to a robot, that I realized how pathetic my life is.