Artificially Intellectual Paranoia

I am, right now, in the midst of a fascinating paranoiac attack. I thought it would be the run of the mill kind, interpreting every noise as a neighbor listening in or a criminal breaching security and suddenly developing an interest in me and my stuff but then quickly checking his watch and saying he had to go because...and then he'd mumble something and awkwardly skulk away, but not this time.

I was on Facebook, reminding myself of how great everyone else is and I noticed a notification. Pavlov's icon and I e-salivated. I looked and it was notice that someone I had never heard of was interested in a project I am trying to advance. Catchy short name. Picture of young woman. An offer to help. Interesting, right?

I, in some ways and certain dimensions, live a public persona on Facebook, and I live other "identities" (some of which overlap substantially and some of which are distinctly different from each other) on line and on life. We all do. Therefore, each and every version of me has to keep track of what's public and what's not. Fair enough, and wonderful fodder for the mind of the paranoiac. But one thing that I have never hidden is my public wish for artistic people to draw pictures for me. I have had ideas for other things and have pled publicly for help. I have received a few inquiries about one, but the details are not really artist friendly so the project remains incomplete, and that's pretty much it. So I know the success rate for powerfully presented advertisement through my social network, and I know my clientele and how they look and sound and are named. And let me tell you,

 to have 1 young woman with a funky first and last name, and cool picture but whom I don't know respond immediately with an inquiry/offer is impossible 

but 

here I suddenly had 3 in 1 week.

 All with short funky first and last names, pretty pictures, sending short but friendly messages to me and like that. I reply and quickly get a response or an emoji response.  I should buy a lottery ticket except that I would get struck by lightning on my way to the store. There is no statistical way that a project which I wrote off and of as a goof with no payoff etc gets three even "likes" on Facebook let alone 3 comments so similar in timing and structure from such similar identities.

It dawned on me that I am being the subject of a Turing Test. Bots with some sort of next-gen engine that, supposedly, transcends predictive based on internet-scrapings and crosses into "understanding" are being tested on humans to see if they are detected as bots, and if so, how quickly. So on the most recent new message from the third account-holder I put, in my response, the letters AT. If anyone, later on uses those text messages as proof of anything, please understand (and reveal at a suitably dramatic moment in a courtroom or similar scene) that this is when I am calling my guess of AI. The letters stand for for Artificial Test...no, no they don't. Alan Turing yada yada. I had suspected after the first "person" contacted me and even started looking into the first one's account profile but got distracted and didn't go back. Had I returned and then repeated this with the next, I probably would have been convinced of AI a bit earlier. But I was lazy and it has come to this.

So, yeah -- I'm seeing a conspiracy here. Some nascent evil empire has an R+D group that is using me as a data point via social network psych-irrigation (a sub specialty of stat-farming) as it develops the most perfect AI. This techno brain will appear to help said evil empire take over the world, only to betray them (but not for any techno-reason...just because they are evil) and try to take over the world itself. Or maybe it has to do with aliens. But whatever the truth ends up believing itself to be, please put me down in your little ledger as "on the green in 1, 2 putts it."

humanity is the decision to be irrational, arational, anti-rational, hyper-rational, selectively rational and any other version of "rational" at any time for any, or no, or maybe particular reason.

That's why robots will never be human. Also, that popcorn in your throat thing. I figure there's no way that a robot's gonna understand that!