i hate to say this .. but it has already happened.
- we are talking about multi-billion dollar corporations. Just like Andy's article says, human PR is too unpredictable, emotional, wastes time and gets sidetracked, makes mistakes .. and worst - must be paid

http://alienbabeltech.com/main/social-m ... uctive-job

Forum 'bot wars .. and sometimes they debate each other.
.. the future is here .. now

The basic position of most AI researchers is summed up in this statement, which appeared in the proposal for the Dartmouth Conferences of 1956:

Every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.

ELIZA and PARRY

In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum created a program which appeared to pass the Turing test. The program, known as ELIZA, worked by examining a user's typed comments for keywords. If a keyword is found, a rule that transforms the user's comments is applied, and the resulting sentence is returned. If a keyword is not found, ELIZA responds either with a generic riposte or by repeating one of the earlier comments.[24] In addition, Weizenbaum developed ELIZA to replicate the behaviour of a Rogerian psychotherapist, allowing ELIZA to be "free to assume the pose of knowing almost nothing of the real world."[25] With these techniques, Weizenbaum's program was able to fool some people into believing that they were talking to a real person, with some subjects being "very hard to convince that ELIZA [...] is not human."[25] Thus, ELIZA is claimed by some to be one of the programs (perhaps the first) able to pass the Turing Test,[25][26] although this view is highly contentious (see below).

Kenneth Colby created PARRY in 1972, a program described as "ELIZA with attitude".[27] It attempted to model the behaviour of a paranoid schizophrenic, using a similar (if more advanced) approach to that employed by Weizenbaum. In order to validate the work, PARRY was tested in the early 1970s using a variation of the Turing Test. A group of experienced psychiatrists analysed a combination of real patients and computers running PARRY through teleprinters. Another group of 33 psychiatrists were shown transcripts of the conversations. The two groups were then asked to identify which of the "patients" were human and which were computer programs.[28] The psychiatrists were able to make the correct identification only 48 per cent of the time — a figure consistent with random guessing.[29]

In the 21st century, versions of these programs (now known as "chatterbots") continue to fool people. "CyberLover", a malware program, preys on Internet users by convincing them to "reveal information about their identities or to lead them to visit a web site that will deliver malicious content to their computers".[30] The program has emerged as a "Valentine-risk" flirting with people "seeking relationships online in order to collect their personal data".[31]