Google’s DeepMind AI is learning how to talk. And learning how to do it like a person, not a computer. DeepMind has many learning projects going on right now, but the newest one to catch our ears seems to be an increasingly realistic voice and speech pattern system that eliminates more and more of the inhuman, robotic patterns we use to identify computers. (1)

After making the computers speaking things that humans normally say, now we make computers speak like humans speak.

And yet, we are not humans for the way we speak.

We are not even human for what we say when we speak.

What makes us humans is something much more special.

Much more subtle.

What makes us human is what we feel while we are silent.

Try teaching that to a computer…

Bzzzzzz*…

* The sound of electrical current in an idle computer…