Man versus machine
Attempts to develop speech-recognition technology appear to be based on the questionable assumption that nearly every caller would opt to speak to a real person rather than a machine (Hello, HAL, “by John Searbrook, June 23rd). However, an infinitely patient machine can be available twenty-four hours a day, every day, and it poses no social risks, such as self-consciousness or embarrassment. In a test we conducted, pitting machine against real-person conversation, participants completed a brief personality survey and were then asked to choose one of three ways to organize their thoughts about their survey experience: interacting online with participants, interacting with chatterbots, or private typing. We found that while most of our participants – forty-two per cent – chose real person interaction, thirty-eight per cent chose machine (chatterbot) conversation. Follow-up experiments and analyses showed that the machine preference was stable and could not be attributed to participants’ mood, to their perception of textmessaging difficulty, or to the novelty of a chatterbot. Some of us would rather stick to automation, whatever its limitations.
(The New Yorker, August 4, 2008, p. 5)
The modals ‘can’ and ‘could’ as used in the text respectively express
