Norman

Personally, when I hear the name "Norman," I think at once of the greatest Norman in the history of Normania...the amazing wit, Norm Macdonald. You might have seen Norm on his dozens of appearances on the David Letterman show, and his walk-on music was usually "Norman," the old Sue Thompson hit with the cool trombones.

And then there are those who think of Norman Bates, the guy in the "Psycho" movie with all the mom issues. Not for me, although I did enjoy Anthony Perkins, the star of "Psycho," in his sensitive portrayal of Jimmy Piersall, the guy who lost his mind while playing for the Red Sox in "Fear Strikes Out." That had a more believable plot, because it was a true story!

But the smart guys at MIT - the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - have been working with "AI"- artificial intelligence - for quite some time. As a person of very little intelligence, artificial or otherwise, I can't begin to figure how this works. Somehow the brainiacs are imbuing machines with human-style intelligence, much like Ted Cruz, only smart. 

Last year,  they developed AI-Powered Empathy, showing artificial images of disasters from all over to see if looking at that sadness could help the robots gnerate sympathy for those in pain and suffering.

Remember, this all started years ago with robots that could play chess, and now they have upgraded to an AI with a psychopathic personality, like we need more of them running around loose. They fed the artificial noggin stories of death and dismemberment, and presto - instant psycho!

MIT's Norman

And they named it Norman, after Norman Bates. 

And in case you wonder how they filled a fake brain with horrible thoughts and notions, it was simple: they exposed "Norman" to the captions - not the actual photos and videos - of death and mayhem and havoc on the Reddit internet page. They found a subreddit (discussion group) so grisly that the researchers won't even say what it was, and then, after "he" read all this gore, they flashed Rorschach ink blot tests at "him," and sure enough, "he" had a bizarre outlook.

F'instance, there's an ink blot that you and I would look at and say, "It looks like a bunch of birds on a tree branch." But after reading those macabre captions, Norman thought that same image looked like a man being electrocuted.

For the blot that we would call "a person holding an umbrella in the air," Norman "looks" at that and sees "a man shot dead in front of his screaming wife."

This proves that an Artificial Intelligence being shows a bias, depending on what material it is shown. Show it agony and death, and it "sees" things that way.

Show it raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, and it breaks into a medley of Broadway show-stoppers.

They were going to let Norman watch Fox News for a week, but there are limits to how much even a robot should suffer.