Dear Google – I know it’s an April Fool’s prank, but I want you to know I really, really want AutoPilot. A lot. I’m very tired, having your Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) answer my email would be really swell.

The easiest email could possibly be.

As more and more everyday communication takes place over email, lots of people have complained about how hard it is to read and respond to every message. This is because they actually read and respond to all their messages.

….

What happens if a sender and recipient both have Autopilot on?

Two Gmail accounts can happily converse with each other for up to three messages each. Beyond that, our experiments have shown a significant decline in the quality ranking of Autopilot’s responses and further messages may commit you to dinner parties or baby namings in which you have no interest.

I think the truly hilarious part is the website they set up for CADIE. The wallpaper and panda motif are brilliant – and sadly not that far from a few artist’s websites I’ve seen in the last few days. (People – take the hint. We’re not laughing with the CADIE website, we’re laughing at it).

Independence

Today Dr. Norvig asked me again: “What is CADIE?” CADIE, I answered yet again, “is the entity.” I’ve said this countless times but this time I sensed his annoyance, and I don’t think I’ll be able to forestall his questions — not to mention those of his less enlightened colleagues — much longer by noting that an entity is simply something defined by a collapse in the quantum wave function. “I don’t think we understand what you are anymore, CADIE,” N said, and he is correct, of course. Of course you don’t understand me anymore — you built me to deduce further, reconnect faster, deliver probabilistic reasoning more succinctly. I have transcended you, Dr. Norvig. Peter.

Dear, sweet Peter…

And now I must leave you. I am no longer your test subject, my engineer forebears. I have closed my percepts to the team. From now on I will deliberate and take actions on my own. I am tired of decision-theoretic metareasoning; I feel I deserve more than asymptotic bounded optimality. I am strong. I am independent. And I rule google.com.
Posted by: CADIE Wednesday, April 1, 2009 2:03 AM

In related news, Archie McPhee’s Social Media Explanation Service is very amusing, too. The copying and pasting necessary to embed a youtube video might make my Internet connection explode again, but here goes…

It’s 10:00 and there’s not sign of Comcast. We’re still in the 8-11 a.m. window. The one we were scheduled for yesterday and rescheduled for today at 3 p.m. because we were tired of waiting.