The Most Human Human by Brian Christian

(I got interested in computers more or less by accident and I remain interested in them as valuable tools and life-enhancers, not as ends in themselves. So far, it is human experience and meaning that matters to me, not electrical currents or coding. It was the need to accomplish statistical computation, clerical alphabetizing, and the simplification of word processing over my poor use of a typewriter.)

I have found the term "rationalization" to be helpful. It refers to thinking out what we want the machine to accomplish by studying what skilled and experienced people do.

This is a page related to a LIFE presentation on the book

"The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive" by Brian Christian (Anchor, 2012)

Presentation slides

The book generally discusses the Loebner contest pitting computer software against humans to see if judges can discriminate between messages sent to and from a computer and those sent to and from a human. Brian Christian entered the contest in the hope of being judged the most human human and not being labeled a computer. The book tells of his research and thinking trying to best prepare himself for the contest. Here is a link to the Atlantic article by Brian Christian, which is a good summary of the book.

Below are titles and links related to the LIFE presentation.

The Turing Test - test at the heart of the Loebner contest, first proposed by Alan Turing, British logician and scientist

The Loebner contest that Brian Christian entered to actually conduct the Turing Test, held annually beginning in 1991.

Google page of Eliza links. Eliza was one of the first simulations of a human by software and was written by Joseph Weizenbaum, who won the first round of of the Loebner contest. Eliza simulates a counselor and you can talk to her and see if she can advise you helpfully.

I, Robot - collection of stories by Isaac Asimov concerning robots and humans. First story is of a robot nanny, good enough to provoke jealousy in the real mom.

Richard Bandler books - Bandler is an experienced hypnotist and therapist. He is mentioned in The Most Human Human as a skilled curer of phobias, which he doesn't need to understand to cure.

Great review of The Most Human Human by Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker

Another good subject is covered in the book by Stephen Baker "Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything". It is the story of the defeat of champion human players of the quiz show game "Jeopardy" by the IBM computer named Watson.

I recently became aware of The Race Against the Machine by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, an exploration of the larger possibility that computers might displace too many workers and leave too many with no jobs.

Just this week, from the New York Times, "deep learning" progress in better translation, seeing, listening and thinking by machines.

Notes and highlights from The Most Human Human

This model of language, this presumed one-to-one mapping of “inputs” to “outputs,” leads to all sorts of terrific opportunities for mischief making, I discovered, when it comes to conversing with chatbots. ELIZA’s pattern matching, for instance, isn’t sophisticated enough to consider whether the pattern it’s trying to match is one utterance or many. When I begin a conversation as follows— ME: I am Brian. ELIZA: Do you enjoy being Brian? —and reply “I, er, guess so,” I get back the noncommittal response “I see.” But if I—as many instant-message users do—break that response up across multiple carriage returns, chaos ensues: ME: I ME: er ME: guess so ELIZA: Tell me more … ELIZA: Tell me more … ELIZA: Tell me more …Read more at location 2907

If you talk to Cleverbot, 2005 and 2006 Loebner Prize winner, at its website, each time you hit the enter key, the input box locks and cannot be clicked or typed into until Cleverbot has finished responding: ME: oh hi CLEVERBOT: How are you? ME: um, CLEVERBOT: Is that good or bad? ME: well, CLEVERBOT: How? If you talk to Elbot, the 2008 Loebner Prize winner, online, each time you hit the enter key the screen refreshes, and one of Elbot’s responses is visible: ME: umm ELBOT: I’m starting to wonder: Who convinced you to come visit me? ME: well, ELBOT: yes! ME: um … ELBOT: That would be a great name for a robot! With a number of customer-representative-type bots, like the ones at alaskaair.com, continental.com, and goarmy.com, the input screen locks into a “Please wait …” message after each carriage return: YOU ASKED: uh JENN: That’s ok, what else can I help you with? YOU ASKED: well JENN: I’m not sure how to answer that. Please try rewording your question. YOU ASKED: um JENN: Children traveling alone are welcome on Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air. Here’s information regarding our Unaccompanied Minor service. It’s fascinating that for all the trenchant questioning that many of these programs can deal with, mere mumbling destroys them.Read more at location 2922

No, I think sophistication, complexity of behavior, is not it at all. Computation theorist Hava Siegelmann offhandedly described intelligence as “a kind of sensitivity to things,” and all of a sudden it clicked—that’s it! These Turing test programs that hold forth, these prefabricated poem templates, may produce interesting output, but they’re static, they don’t react. They are, in other words, insensitive.Read more at location 3661

This is part of why computers behave so much better after a reboot than after days of continuous use, and so much better when first purchased than after several years. These “blank-slate” states are the ones most encountered, and therefore most polished, by the programmers. The longer a computer system is active, the more unique its state tends to become. By and large this is true of people too—except people can’t reboot.Read more at location 3754

The organizer of the 2008 Loebner Prize was University of Reading professor Kevin Warwick—also known in the press sometimes as “the world’s first cyborg.” In 1998 he had an RFID chip implanted in his arm: when he walks into his department, the doors open for him and a voice says, “Hello, Professor Warwick.” More recently, he’s undergone a second surgery, a much more invasive one: wiring a hundred-electrode array directly into the nerves of his arm.Read more at location 3814

He also experimented with adding a sixth sense—namely, sonar. A sonar device attached to a baseball cap routed its signals into Warwick’s arm. At first, he says, he kept feeling as though his index finger was tingling whenever large objects got near him. But in very little time, the brain accustomed itself to the new data and the sensation of finger tingling went away. Close-by objects simply produced a kind of ineffable “oh, there’s an object close by” feeling. His brain had made sense of and integrated the data. He’d acquired a sixth sense.Read more at location 3821

Perhaps the most amazing thing that Warwick did with his arm socket, though, is what he tried next. Warwick wasn’t the only one to get silicon grafted into his arm nerves. So did his wife. She would make a certain gesture with her arm, Warwick’s arm would twinge. Primitive? Maybe, yes. But Warwick waxes Wright brothers/Kitty Hawk about it. The Wrights were only off the ground for seconds at first; now we are used to traveling so far so fast that our bodies get out of sync with the sun. A twinge is ineloquent: granted. But it represents the first direct nervous-system-to-nervous-system human communication. A signal that shortcuts language, shortcuts gesture. “It was the most exciting thing,” says Warwick, “I mean, when that signal arrived and I could understand the thing—and realizing what potentially that would mean in the future—Oh, it was the most exciting thing by far that I’ve been involved with.” What might it mean in the future? What might the Lindbergh- or Earhart-comparable voyage be? As Douglas Hofstadter writes, “If the bandwidth were turned up more and more and more and still more … the sense of a clear boundary between them would slowly be dissolved.” Healed at last? By bandwidth, of all things? It’s not as crazy as it sounds. It’s what’s happening right now, in your own head.Read more at location 3828

This intense desire to make one of two, to be “healed” and restored to unity: this is the human condition. Not just the state of our sexuality, but the state of our minds. The eternal desire to “catch up,” to “stay connected,” in the face of flurrying activity and change. You never really gain ground and you never really lose ground. You aren’t unified but you aren’t separate.Read more at location 3858

“They’re basically the same person,” we sometimes say of a couple. We may not be entirely kidding. There’s a Bach wedding cantata where the married couple is addressed with second-person-singular pronouns. Because in English these are the same as the second-person-plural pronouns—“you,” “your”—the effect doesn’t quite translate. However, we do sometimes see the opposite, where a coupled partner describes events that happened only to him- or herself, or only to the partner, using “we”—or, more commonly, simply talks about the couple as a unit, not as “she and I.” A recent study at UC Berkeley, led by psychology Ph.D. student Benjamin Seider, found that the tendency toward what he calls linguistic “we-ness” was greater in older couples than younger ones.Read more at location 3862

If it’s communication that makes a whole of our two-hemisphere brain, there should be no reason why two people, communicating well enough, couldn’t create the four-hemisphere brain. Perhaps two become one through the same process one becomes one. It may end up being talk—the other intercourse—that heals the state of man. If we do it right.Read more at location 3872

Don't forget Siri on iPhones, Dr. Riggs' great love. And there is Charter's phonebot.

A phone that could consistently anticipate what you were intending to write, or at least that could do as well as a human, would be just as intelligent as the program that could write you back like a human. Meaning that the average American teenager, going by the New York Times’s 2009 statistics on cell phone texting, participates in roughly eighty Turing tests a day.Read more at location 398

I think our fairy tales prepare our children for this kind of existential panic about growing up. Nothing is more dispiriting than “And they all lived happily ever after,” which means, in information entropy terms, “And then nothing interesting or noteworthy ever happened to them again for the rest of their lives.” Or at the very least, “And then you can pretty much imagine what their forties, fifties, and sixties were like, blah, blah, blah, the end.” I don’t think it would be going too far to argue that these fairy tales sow the seeds of divorce. No one knows what to do after the wedding! Like an entrepreneur who assumed his company would have been bought by now, like an actor out of lines but aware that the cameras are still rolling … marriage, for people raised on Western fairy tales, has that same kind of eerie “Um … now what?” quality. “We just, ah, keep on being married, I guess?”Read more at location 4229

I think the reason novels are regarded to have so much more “information” than films is that they outsource the scenic design and the cinematography to the reader. If characters are said to be “eating eggs,” we as readers fill in the plate, silverware, table, chairs, skillet, spatula … Granted, each reader’s spatula may look different, whereas the film pins it down: this spatula, this very one. These specifications demand detailed visual data (ergo, the larger file size of video) but frequently don’t matter (ergo, the greater experienced complexity of the novel).Read more at location 4467