Where is your Furby now?

Where is your Furby now?

Elle O’Brien made me this image commemorating a chance remark. Furby was a dialogue toy released by Hasbro in 1998. As Wikipedia says:

The main reason for their popularity was because of apparent “intelligence”, reflected in their ability to develop language skills.

People thought they might be recording then repeating words, so out of an abundance of paranoia caution, intelligence agencies banned them from the premises.

These days we know better, we know that a Furby can’t learn human language, because it doesn’t have a user model, or any ability to hear, or a record of the dialog history, or any actual knowledge of anything, but is only faking it. Besides, we have our own billion-dollar dialogue toys to play with, and these are, supposedly, truly intelligent :wink:.