Speak or forever hold your peace

Sometimes just being in Sydney gives me great pleasure...coming across things that you have never realised existed. Today was one of those days. On a lazy Sunday afternoon where I decided to visit the art gallery to see a Monet exhibition I wandered through the Domain.
I guess it's the first time (or at least it's been awhile) since I've made this journey on a Sunday. But for those that are not aware...Sydney has it's own "Speaker's Corner", and it was these interesting characters that I came across.

Now I am totally all for free speech, and the concept of a speaker's corner is fantastic...however, it is totally de-valued when the people speaking are nutters! I spoke to some man who was convinced he had developed a way to read words despite what language you spoke. He was however convinced that this was the start of "artificial intelligence"...Is it just me or is artificial intelligence all about machine learning...and just by changing the way you write a word phonetically does not make it (the machine), or even people understand the definition of these words.

I got a bit frustrated trying to explain it to this guy, so I gave up. I am hoping that the people that come to listen to these people still think for themselves and do not take what they hear as gospel. Otherwise, we might be surrounded by people in a society whereby everyone is brainwashed.