No Shitcumber

Tonight's Atlanta Quality Assurance Association meetup was an interview, of Harry Collins by Michael Bolton, on the topic The Impact of AI on Software Testing.

Collins' definition of artificial intelligence is "the ability to pass a demanding Turing Test." This kind of test requires knowledge of, and reasoning about, the society in which the dialogue is taking place. He gave an example from Roald Dahl's Big Friendly Giant where snozzcumber is considered an acceptable name for an imaginary vegetable, but shitcumber probably wouldn't be.

That may seem obvious to us, but on what basis would a machine learning algorithm fed tons of textual data, perhaps scraped from the chaotic mess that is the internet, be able to tell? He relates this question to his taxonomy of expertise in which interactional expertise is what gives a conversational participant the language of practice — so much more than simply words and grammar — of their community.

Although it's hard to do, as testers we'll fare better in our relationships with developers, users, and the business if we invest in growing our interactional expertise in their domains. Interactional expertise, or as I will now think of it, talking snozzcumber.

Comments

Unknown said…

Love your pictures on these posts!

January 19, 2021 at 4:03 PM

James Thomas said…

Cheers!

January 19, 2021 at 4:45 PM

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Hiccupps

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