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     In chapter 3 of Sherry Turkels book "Life on the Screen", the author starts of with a comparison of how the children of today react differently to computers than children of twenty years ago.  Turkel begins by stating that "until the advent of the computer, children who became facinated by technology could have thier interest held by the promise of understanding a mechanical system.  What this means basically is if a child wanted to learn how a toy worked he or she could always take it apart because usually the internal mechanisms were fairly easy to understand.  Some examples would be erector sets, model trains and Legos although the latter really had no internal mechanisms.
     With the advent of computers children began viewing them psychologically.  What this means is that even if a child opened up a computer to see the internal workings, chances are they wouldn't understand what was going on.  Therefore the children would think of the computer as somthing with a mind.
     Later in Chapter 3, Turkel begins on the idea of intelligent machines.  Turkel points to the "Turing Test", this test was devised by mathematician Alan Turing as a way of testing whether a computer could pass for human.  The Turing test is simple enough, a person asks a question through a computer terminal and receives responses via the terminal.  If the person feels that they are talking to a real person rather than a computer than the machine is intelligent an thus passes the Turing Test.  Later in the Chapter, Turkel points out that the Turing Test came under heavy fire from philosopher John Searle who said" true understanding could never be achieved by a computer program, no matter how clever, because any program simply follows rules and thus could never understand what it was doing.
     Finally, in the last part of the chapter Turkel gives the reader a humorous example of how one person was fooled by a computer program.  The computer program was named Julia and was actually a bot designed to go on a MUD or multi-user domain and give the impression of being human.  Turkel lists many encounters a human player named Barry had with the bot Julia.  Barry was totally fooled for months into believing that he was corresponding with an actual human.  To be perfectly honest, after reading the dialogue between Barry and Julia, I admit I probably would have been fooled also.

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