Artificial intelligence, or AI, has come pretty far in the last few years - much more then anyone really expected it would - and yet somehow, we seem to be just as far from truly intelligent systems as we ever were. No doubt, the great author Isaac Asimov would be impressed with what we have managed to accomplish, especially considering how many of his predictions have come true. However, we still haven't got any positronic brains, or thinking machines such as he suggested.
Still, although our computers hardly act with intelligence and can certainly not think, there are still thinking elements that occasionally appear. For example, look at the web spider. Obviously not a real spider, I mean the automated little programs that can surf the web almost as well as a human can. Designed to browse the internet and pick out specific key phrases, or pages, they can act fairly intelligently in this particular area.
Although our computers remain unable to communicate through speech, and are physically very different from us, you could well argue that they are still able to read the news. As the internet grows, web spiders and surfing robots become ever more common, especially as the amount of data available make it more important then ever that we find some way to manage it and find what we are looking for.
Programs can be created that allow not only searching the web, but also interaction with it. Meanwhile, although everyone who has a page wants people to visit it, for those of us who are running businesses online those visitors are truly essential.
Having a horde of robots coming through the site will be of no benefit, and can even hurt, especially if the robots are controlled by spammers. If you run a site such as a blog or a forum, it is especially important that you only allow humans to enter. While you can place tags on your site to deny robots access, and many robots will follow these, it is not these that are the problem. You need some way of blocking access unless the one entering can prove they are human.
So what is it that separates the man from the machine? Something that any human will be able to do, but no robot could? The answer, of course, is character recognition. Humans are easily able to read text, and can even do so if it has been altered- stretched slightly, if it changes colour, or even has a small line through it. Robots can't do this. This is known as a CAPTCHA, a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.
All you have to do is install a simple program onto your website, and it will produce a small image with altered text. The visitor has to type that text into a box before they can log in, or otherwise interact with a form. This will block any robots from using it, as the robot will not be able to read the text.
This, of course, does not answer the title question... or does it? An essential part of the news is the images that go along with the text, so without the ability to understand a picture, I have to say that no, no computer can really read the news, no matter how easy it is to access newspapers online.
