The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive
Brian Christian
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0385533063
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Most Human Human is a provocative, exuberant, and profound exploration of the ways in which computers are reshaping our ideas of what it means to be human. Its starting point is the annual Turing Test, which pits artificial intelligence programs against people to determine if computers can “think.”
Named for computer pioneer Alan Turing, the Turing Test convenes a panel of judges who pose questions—ranging anywhere from celebrity gossip to moral conundrums—to hidden contestants in an attempt to discern which is human and which is a computer. The machine that most often fools the panel wins the Most Human Computer Award. But there is also a prize, bizarre and intriguing, for the Most Human Human.
In 2008, the top AI program came short of passing the Turing Test by just one astonishing vote. In 2009, Brian Christian was chosen to participate, and he set out to make sure Homo sapiens would prevail.
The author’s quest to be deemed more human than a computer opens a window onto our own nature. Interweaving modern phenomena like customer service “chatbots” and men using programmed dialogue to pick up women in bars with insights from fields as diverse as chess, psychiatry, and the law, Brian Christian examines the philosophical, biological, and moral issues raised by the Turing Test.
One central definition of human has been “a being that could reason.” If computers can reason, what does that mean for the special place we reserve for humanity?
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have I had today? How much coffee have I had today? How well have I been eating? How much have I been exercising? How have I been sleeping? How’s the weather?” And sometimes that’s the best I can do: eat some fruit, jog around the neighborhood, take a nap, and on and on till the mood changes and I think, “Oh, I guess that was it.” I’m not much better than the infant. Once, in graduate school, after making what I thought was not a trivial, but not a particularly major, life decision, I started to
that the judge will want to talk about the immediate environment. What color is Hugh Loebner’s shirt? What do you think of the art in the lobby? Have you tried any of the food vendors outside? It’s extremely hard to update your program’s script that close to the contest itself. I should think that a non-localized Turing test, in which participants don’t gather at a particular city and building but are connected to other humans (and bots) at random around the world, would be much, much more
high—but finite—rate. Set lovers aside for a moment: the integrity and coherence of the mind, the oneness of the self, is dependent on data transfer. On communication. One metaphysical oddity: communication comes in degrees. The number of minds, the number of selves, in a body, seemingly, doesn’t. This begs odd questions. If the bandwidth of one’s corpus callosum were turned up just slightly, would that make someone somehow “closer” to one self? If the bandwidth were turned down just slightly,
humans look … [It] represents an easily computable shortcut towards events which deserve attention.” In other words, entropy guides the eye. It gives every passage a secret shape. Artifacts Lossy compression brings along with it what are known as compression “artifacts”—the places where the lossiness of the compression process leaves its scars on the data. The interesting thing about compression artifacts is that they are not random—as a matter of fact, they have a kind of signature. Two
in that sense, falters. In similar fashion, when a judge I was talking to spelled “color” in the British style (“colour”), and then several messages later referenced “Ny,” which I took to mean “New York” (actually it turned out to be a typo for “My”), I asked where he was from. “Canadian spelling, not Biritish [sic],” he explained; my hope was that showing attunement, and over multiple utterances, to these questions of cohesiveness of identity would help my case. Presumably, a bot that can’t