Whenever I want to revel in human superiority over machines, I remember that no artificial intelligence yet design can read handwriting, or even, for that matter, those bendy letters and numbers that sites put up to protect themselves from bot intruders.

But it does raise an interesting question. What is it that allows us to look at a bendy a, or an a in someone else's handwriting, and yet recognise it as as a? How are we able to abstract the Platonic ur-a from all the various outward manifestations of said letter we encounter in our lives? If we could design a bot that could somehow abstract in this way, we'd have cracked a major AI issue

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I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?

It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername.