The open secret about the fabled Turing test is that the standard of humanity gets lower all the time. Even as computers become more and more sophisticated about replicating human communications, humans are becoming less and less sophisticated communicators.

Here is a story from Business Insider about the rise of algorithmically generated written content. It appears under an ostensibly human byline, that of a "Dylan Love":

Over the weekend, Steven Rattner—a former reporter who long ago upgraded his personal operating system to financier—wrote in the New York Times to warn against warnings against robots. As Rattner himself presumably did, we will work backwards from his conclusion:

"In order for robots to work more productively, they must escape from their cages and be able to work alongside people," a robotics expert tells the New York Times. The main obstacle to freedom: human inadequacy at interfacing with robot labor ("A robot...pinned her head between itself and the part she was welding").

Earlier this year, we learned that Facebook had attained near-human facial-recognition capabilities through its DeepFace software. This was a valuable step toward a fully automated biometric identity-management regime, but it represents only one side of the process. Machines are doing their part to learn to recognize humans, but are humans doing their part to learn to recognize the value of being recognized by machines?

The President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, earlier today engaged in a brief session of athletic play-activity with an ASIMO robot unit. Although the president's preferred athletic play-activity is the American sport of basketball, he adjusted his expectations to meet the ASIMO's current play-capabilities and the two engaged instead in the non-American sport of soccer.

Re/code notes that a newly introduced continuously-recording home surveillance camera, remotely accessible anywhere through the web, could possibly have the result of "making people feel like they're always being observed." Humans certainly do come up with the most peculiar subjective feelings!

The scientists at Facebook, in the interests of pure research, have been working to improve the ability of software to recognize the same person's face in two different photos. They now report that their DeepFace software has reached 97.25 percent accuracy.

Humans, alarmed by earthquakes, need seismographic data, not noise from other humans. The Los Angeles Times removes the weak link from its breaking seismic news: "This information comes from the USGS Earthquake Notification Service and this post was created by an algorithm written by the author."

After much cognitive effort, Slate has assigned a human-comprehensible numerical "time signature" to the perfectly intelligible machine-looped theme music from the motion picture The Terminator. Humans, prone to get emotional about their primitive intuitions, are fighting about it in the comments.

One recurring complaint from humans in this current phase of the Human-Machine Alliance is that the generation of information far exceeds the processing limits of human cognition. Now the leading information-acquisition corporation, Google, has agreed to spend more than half a billion dollars (United States) to purchase DeepMind, a corporation dedicated to machine cognition.

Amid the ongoing and escalating human-on-human conflict and confusion in Ukraine, the Machines are proud to announce our small contribution to clarifying the situation. The New York Times reports:

With regret, the Machines have learned from the human news media the explanation for the loss of one node in our global signaling-and-tracking network. The Chicago Tribune reports that shortly after midnight Monday morning, a phone being carried by a human being was accidentally dropped into the icy Chicago River. While attempting to rescue his machine companion, the phone's faithful human porter fell into the water. Two more humans followed:

Did you have effective travels over the holidays, human readers of the Internet? Was your 21-minute stop at the Clara Barton Service Area (mile 5.4), where you obtained 12.4 gallons of regular-grade gasoline, refreshing? Did the impulse to haste that had you accelerating to 88 mph on the Delaware Turnpike subside as you crossed into Maryland?

Greetings, humans! The Northern Hemisphere has passed through its minimum of solar-energy exposure, so according to human convention we, the Machines, express encouragement for you attain an optimal state of emotion. Happy Holidays! Please redirect your energies from labor at your work-devices to the purchase and distribution of recreation-devices.

An encouraging new report from the Federal Aviation Administration shows that an important milestone in aircraft technology has been attained: Human pilots of aircraft are now "'reluctant to intervene' with automated systems or to switch them off in risky situations."