Time Travelers

This is a blog of 2 time travelers, one from the past and the other from the future.

First, the one from the past, the one Tim Wu describes:

“A well-educated time traveller from 1914 enters a room divided in half by a curtain. A scientist tells him that his task is to ascertain the intelligence of whoever is on the other side of the curtain by asking whatever questions he pleases.

The traveller’s queries are answered by a voice with an accent that he does not recognize (twenty-first-century American English). The woman on the other side of the curtain has an extraordinary memory. She can, without much delay, recite any passage from the Bible or Shakespeare. Her arithmetic skills are astonishing—difficult problems are solved in seconds. She is also able to speak many foreign languages, though her pronunciation is odd. Most impressive, perhaps, is her ability to describe almost any part of the Earth in great detail, as though she is viewing it from the sky.”

And so, says Wu:

“Our time traveller would conclude that, in the past century, the human race achieved a new level of superintelligence.”

Of course, we know better: the lady behind the curtain has a smartphone!

Nick Carr points out this experiment is the “Reverse Turk” in action:

“Mechanical Turk, the chess-playing automaton, amazed eighteenth century audiences with his prowess at the game of kings — until it was revealed that a small-statured human chess master, hidden inside the automaton, was actually making the moves. And so now the roles are reversed:  the superintelligent human hides a small-statured, question-answering automaton!”

Now for the one from our future. Did you hear of this study where two physicists scanned Facebook, Twitter, Google, Google+, and Bing for signs of whether someone from the future is already with us? How did they search, you ask. Well, here’s their thinking:

“A time traveller might have been trying to collect historical information that did not survive into the future, or might have searched for a prescient term because they erroneously thought that a given event had already occurred, or searched to see whether a given event was yet to occur.”

Basically, they searched the sites for usage of terms “that would have absolutely no reason for entering the public lexicon” until later in time. Terms like Pope Francis and Comet ISON that didn’t make sense until a certain date. Their finding? No such sign. So does that there no time travelers among us? Or does it just mean that they haven’t slipped up yet?