Protocol droid

Japan's Justice Minister, Minoru Yanagida, just let the cat out of the bag:

Yanagida said ... that justice ministers had to remember only two responses to deal with tough questions in the Diet: "I want to refrain from commenting on specific cases" and "We are dealing with the matter appropriately based on the law and evidence."

At Thursday's Upper House Budget Committee, the LDP's Hiroshige Seko reviewed Yanagida's past Diet responses and counted 16 occasions when he used the "refrain from commenting" response and 17 times when he resorted to the "law and evidence" response.

Yanagida replied, "I apologize for comments that lacked thinking, and I will seriously respond in the future."

However, he repeatedly used the same words, prompting Seko to say that Yanagida had simply come up with a third pat answer. 

As reported in Asahi Shimbun. This validates the following observations:

• Senior politicians and spokespeople are routinely coached to limit their public utterances to a narrow range of anodyne cut-and-paste generalisations pre-screened to eliminate any useful information and/or hostages to fortune. When they stray from this simple script and say something concrete, original and understandable, they are said to have made a "gaffe."

• Statements from gaffe-averse senior politicians or spokespeople are either totally unspecific or irrelevant. In interviews, their responses are so littered with unanswered questions and bizarre non sequiturs that they scarcely seem able to pass the Turing Test.

Perhaps, to avoid public relations "gaffes", political parties and other PR-sensitive organisations need to avoid letting humans make statements and do interviews. You wouldn't need to develop a super-intelligent AI that could pass the Turing Test - just a far cruder automaton that could mimic the robotic stock responses of a politician avoiding straight answers to questions and staying on message, no matter how tenuous the link between the question being asked and anything resembling an intelligent response. Come to think of it, the Japanese have already developed the hardware, if not the software...