Hey, Human, How are you?

What grade would a computer get in your class?

What grade would you get in someone else’s class?

Would the person grading your answers know you were not a computer?

Welcome to the brave new world of the Turing test. Take a bunch of computer programs designed to make you think they’re a human when you talk with them. Mix them up with a control group of real humans. Set them up against a group of judges who will interact anonymously with each “entity” for 5 minutes and must figure out who is who. The computer program that fools the greatest number of judges into thinking that it is a human gets the Loebner prize for the “Most Human Computer.” The human that manages to convince the greatest number of judges that s/he really is a human and not a computer gets the “Most Human Human” prize.

The best computer programs are getting close to Turing’s 50 year old prediction: they can fool nearly 30% of judges into thinking they are humans. Nearly - but not quite - yet... On the human side, in 2008, three people failed to convince the judges that they were humans. Fortunately humanity made a comeback in 2009 led by Brian Christian who went on to tell the tale (1,2).

But how do you do it, when computers have become so good at finding information, at figuring out what we want, at predicting what we will type or say? Ponder this long enough and you will find yourself, like Christian, having to write your version of Daniel Gilbert’s “Sentence”: “The human being is the only animal that …” One way to win in the early days was by being moody, irritable, and obnoxious - a sad reflection on human nature perhaps. Brian Christian has a better way: to maximize the number of “swaps” in the conversation: interrupt, respond, go back and forth as much as you can. In that way can you make a connection, a human connection.

So amid the din of people predicting the demise of the university, let us take a leaf from Christian’s book: what is it that we can do that a computer cannot? What is it that we can get a computer to do so that we can do more: more nurturing, more guiding, more motivating, more challenging? How can we be more human?

Benjamin de Foy, Saint Louis University. 15 April 2012.

1. Mind vs. Machine, Brian Christian, Atlantic Magazine, March 2011.

2. The Most Human Human, What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive, Brian Christian, Doubleday, 2011.