Techno Babble

Because Google's speech recognition is so terrible (and maybe because of Craig Ferguson's accent), the "interactive transcript" for the Youtube video "Best Of Craig Ferguson Moments With Ladies Compilation Vol.7" (above) reads like a poem by a nihilistic narrator in a post-apocalyptic wasteland that governance has fled. In other words, the transcript reads more like the lyrics from Godspeed You Black Emperor's "The Dead Flag Blues" (below) than a verbatim account of a talk show host flirting with actresses by tricking them into uttering double entendres.

I've separated the wheat from the chaff in the transcript only by deleting words and adding punctuation plus capitalization so that you can more easily see the hidden poet lurking in the code at Google Headquarters. There is a server somewhere in the recesses of the dungeon basement at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California that came up the source material for the poem below. All I did was edit it down to a more manageable length.

Senator laws about the media beat.
The other way of knowing?

Anti-tank poetry at sidebar.

Hateful kids in the country

Sitting in weird blood spots

You know I know

A dog searched 

(I was there)

Was easy for dogs for months

Cigarette companies have fun 

Trade conflict suggests it may be

The interests of the peace at heart.

Medicaid spots are booking.

Is that what candidates to Mexico

decided not to waste?

God is like an icon

In all my breasts
The left claimed

I was for a while with friends with compromise

Spit on

Well I'm not going to be doing anything about it

All hunters like trying to help you

Since we're using all

Everywhere handed down

Next year degenerated into state religion
Brain leaving backstage
With your words

You know they were like the roadside unanimity in Virginia

Infected and getting older

That was a physics applied

Health care

Gray hair

Seeing how it fits in there

Too few building incidentally,

Everyone in the combined room

Because I'm not charismatic

I can't handle it.

President on holiday

Your citizenship has married him

Here's the thing: 

It would never work; 

It is going to.

My impulse to seek meaning in the gibberish spewed out by youtube's terrible interactive transcript feature reminds me of the way some users of the computer program ELIZA became very attached to the advice that chatterbot software was manufacturing for them. ELIZA was a program written in the mid-60s so the code had to be simple. Consequently, the programmers choose to simulate a Rogerian psychiatrist, i.e. a doctor that responds to any symptom reported by the patient by asking a meta-question about it. For example, if the patient reports a bad relationship with his or her spouse then the program/doctor responds by asking why the patient has a bad relationship with his or her spouse using simple pattern-matching. Some people would quickly see through the artificiality of this but others got caught up in the exchange and treated it as a real conversation with a human and not a machine.

The lesson, as always, is that we are still a long ways from the technological singularity but the human impulse to anthropomorphize is a strong one.