The Most Human Human

by Brian Christian

  The Sentence

  Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert says that every psychologist must, at some point in his or her career, write a version of “The Sentence.” Specifically, The Sentence reads like this: “The human being is the only animal that________.” Indeed, it seems that philosophers, psychologists, and scientists have been writing and rewriting this sentence since the beginning of recorded history. The story of humans’ sense of self is, you might say, the story of failed, debunked versions of The Sentence. Except now it’s not just the animals that we’re worried about.

  We once thought humans were unique for having a language with syntactical rules, but this isn’t so;5 we once thought humans were unique for using tools, but this isn’t so;6 we once thought humans were unique for being able to do mathematics, and now we can barely imagine being able to do what our calculators can.

  There are several components to charting the evolution of The Sentence. One is a historical look at how various developments—in our knowledge of the world as well as our technical capabilities—have altered its formulations over time. From there, we can look at how these different theories have shaped humankind’s sense of its own identity. For instance, are artists more valuable to us than they were before we discovered how difficult art is for computers?

  Last, we might ask ourselves: Is it appropriate to allow our definition of our own uniqueness to be, in some sense, reactionary to the advancing front of technology? And why is it that we are so compelled to feel unique in the first place?

  “Sometimes it seems,” says Douglas Hofstadter, “as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.” While at first this seems a consoling position—one that keeps our unique claim to thought intact—it does bear the uncomfortable appearance of a gradual retreat, the mental image being that of a medieval army withdrawing from the castle to the keep. But the retreat can’t continue indefinitely. Consider: if everything of which we regarded “thinking” to be a hallmark turns out not to involve it, then … what is thinking? It would seem to reduce to either an epiphenomenon—a kind of “exhaust” thrown off by the brain—or, worse, an illusion.

  Where is the keep of our selfhood?

  The story of the twenty-first century will be, in part, the story of the drawing and redrawing of these battle lines, the story of Homo sapiens trying to stake a claim on shifting ground, flanked on both sides by beast and machine, pinned between meat and math.

  And here’s a crucial, related question: Is this retreat a good thing or a bad thing? For instance, does the fact that computers are so good at mathematics in some sense take away an arena of human activity, or does it free us from having to do a nonhuman activity, liberating us into a more human life? The latter view would seem to be the more appealing, but it starts to seem less so if we can imagine a point in the future where the number of “human activities” left to be “liberated” into has grown uncomfortably small. What then?

  Inverting the Turing Test

  There are no broader philosophical implications …

  It doesn’t connect to or illuminate anything.

  –NOAM CHOMSKY, IN AN EMAIL TO THE AUTHOR

  Alan Turing proposed his test as a way to measure the progress of technology, but it just as easily presents us a way to measure our own. Oxford philosopher John Lucas says, for instance, that if we fail to prevent the machines from passing the Turing test, it will be “not because machines are so intelligent, but because humans, many of them at least, are so wooden.”

  Here’s the thing: beyond its use as a technological benchmark, beyond even the philosophical, biological, and moral questions it poses, the Turing test is, at bottom, about the act of communication. I see its deepest questions as practical ones: How do we connect meaningfully with each other, as meaningfully as possible, within the limits of language and time? How does empathy work? What is the process by which someone comes into our life and comes to mean something to us? These, to me, are the test’s most central questions—the most central questions of being human.

  Part of what’s fascinating about studying the programs that have done well at the Turing test is that it is a (frankly, sobering) study of how conversation can work in the total absence of emotional intimacy. A look at the transcripts of Turing tests past is in some sense a tour of the various ways in which we demure, dodge the question, lighten the mood, change the subject, distract, burn time: what shouldn’t pass as real conversation at the Turing test probably shouldn’t be allowed to pass as real human conversation, either.

  There are a number of books written about the technical side of the Turing test: for instance, how to cleverly design Turing test programs—called chatterbots, chatbots, or just bots. In fact, almost everything written at a practical level about the Turing test is about how to make good bots, with a small remaining fraction about how to be a good judge. But nowhere do you read how to be a good confederate. I find this odd, since the confederate side, it seems to me, is where the stakes are highest, and where the answers ramify the furthest.

  Know thine enemy better than one knows thyself, Sun Tzu tells us in The Art of War. In the case of the Turing test, knowing our enemy actually becomes a way of knowing ourselves. So we will, indeed, have a look at how some of these bots are constructed, and at some of the basic principles and most important results in theoretical computer science, but always with our eye to the human side of the equation.

  In a sense, this is a book about artificial intelligence, the story of its history and of my own personal involvement, in my own small way, in that history. But at the core, it’s a book about living life.

  We can think of computers, which take an increasingly central role in our lives, as nemeses: a force like Terminator’s Skynet, or The Matrix’s Matrix, bent on our destruction, just as we should be bent on theirs. But I prefer, for a number of reasons, the notion of rivals—who only ostensibly want to win, and who know that competition’s main purpose is to raise the level of the game. All rivals are symbiotes. They need each other. They keep each other honest. They make each other better. The story of the progression of technology doesn’t have to be a dehumanizing or dispiriting one. Quite, as you will see, the contrary.

  In the months before the test, I did everything I could to prepare, researching and talking with experts in various areas that related back to the central questions of (a) how I could give the “most human” performance possible in Brighton, and (b) what, in fact, it means to be human. I interviewed linguists, information theorists, psychologists, lawyers, and philosophers, among others; these conversations provided both practical advice for the competition and opportunities to look at how the Turing test (with its concomitant questions of humanhood) affects and is affected by such far-flung fields as work, school, chess, dating, video games, psychiatry, and the law.

  The final test, for me, was to give the most uniquely human performance I could in Brighton, to attempt a successful defense against the machines passing the test, and to take a run at bringing home the coveted, if bizarre, Most Human Human prize—but the ultimate question, of course, became what it means to be human: what the Turing test can teach us about ourselves.

  1. Crowd-control stanchions seem to have recently replaced portable disco dance floors as the flagship product of Loebner’s company, Crown Industries, which is the Loebner Prize’s chief sponsor.

  2. Surely I’m not the only one who finds it ironic that a man who’s committed himself to advancing the progress of interaction with artificial entities has resigned himself—as he has discussed openly in the pages of the New York Times and on several television talk shows—to paying, whether happily or unhappily, for human intimacy?

  3. Apparently the “gold” medals are actually silver medals dipped in gold—which is, admittedly, a bit bizarre, although it seems to have caused Loebner more than a decade of outrage, which over the years has vented itself in the form o
f picketing, speeches, and a newsletter called Pants on Fire News.

  4. Say, Ireland.

  5. Michael Gazzaniga, in Human, quotes Great Ape Trust primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh: “First the linguists said we had to get our animals to use signs in a symbolic way if we wanted to say they learned language. OK, we did that, and then they said, ‘No, that’s not language, because you don’t have syntax.’ So we proved our apes could produce some combinations of signs, but the linguists said that wasn’t enough syntax, or the right syntax. They’ll never agree that we’ve done enough.”

  6. Octopuses, for instance, were discovered in 2009 to use coconut shells as “body armor.” The abstract of the paper that broke the news tells the story of our ever-eroding claim to uniqueness: “Originally regarded as a defining feature of our species, tool-use behaviours have subsequently been revealed in other primates and a growing spectrum of mammals and birds. Among invertebrates, however, the acquisition of items that are deployed later has not previously been reported. We repeatedly observed soft-sediment dwelling octopuses carrying around coconut shell halves, assembling them as a shelter only when needed.”

  2. Authenticating

  Authentication: Form & Content

  National Public Radio’s Morning Edition recently reported the story of a man named Steve Royster. Growing up, Royster assumed he had an incredibly unusual and distinctive voice. As he explains, “Everyone always knew when I was calling just by the sound of my voice, while I had no earthly idea who was on the phone when they called.” It would take him until his late twenties before he fully grasped—to his amazement—that other people could discern most everyone’s identity by voice. How on earth could they do that? As it turns out, there is something unusual about Royster, but not about his voice: about his brain. Royster has a rare condition known as “phonagnosia,” or “voice blindness.” Even when Royster’s own mother calls him, he simply goes politely along with the flow of the conversation, unaware that “this strange woman who has called me is, in fact, the one that gave birth to me.” As reporter Alix Spiegel puts it, “Phonagnosics can tell from the sound of your voice if you’re male or female, old or young, sarcastic, upset, happy. They just have no blooming idea who you are.”

  This all puts Royster, of course, in an awfully strange position.

  It happens to be the same position everyone is in on the Internet.

  On September 16, 2008, a twenty-year-old college student named David Kernell attempted to log in to vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s personal Yahoo! email account. He didn’t have a clue what her password might be. Guessing seemed futile; instead, it occurred to him to try to change it—and so he clicked on the “I forgot my password” option available to assist absentminded users. Before Yahoo! will let a user change an account password, it asks the user to answer several “authentication” questions—things like date of birth and zip code—in order to “Verify Your Identity.” Kernell found the information on Wikipedia, he said, in approximately “15 seconds.” Stunned, Kernell “changed the password to ‘popcorn’ and took a cold shower.” Now he faces up to twenty years in prison.

  In the world of machines, we authenticate on content: password, PIN, last four digits of your Social Security number, your mother’s maiden name. But in the human world, we authenticate on form: face, vocal timbre, handwriting, signature.

  And, crucially, verbal style.

  One of my friends emailed me recently: “I’m trying to rent a place in another city by email, and I don’t want the fellow I’ve been communicating with to think I’m scamming him (or, am a flake), so, I’ve been hyperaware of sounding ‘human’ and ‘real’ and basically ‘nonanonymous’ in my emails. A weird thing. Do you know what I mean?” I do; it’s that email’s idiosyncrasies of style—the anachronistic “fellow,” the compound, unhyphenated “hyperaware” and “nonanonymous”—that prove it’s really him.

  This kind of thing—behavior that seems “so you”—might always have been, say, charming or winning (at least to those who like you). Now it’s something else too, our words increasingly dissociated from us in the era of the Internet: part of online security.1

  Antarctic penguins detect the precise call of their chicks among the 150,000 families at the nesting site. “Bless Babel,” fiction writer Donald Barthelme says. It’s true: ironing out our idiosyncrasies in verbal style would not only be bad for literature; it would be bad for safety. Here as elsewhere, maybe that slight machine-exerted pressure to actively assert our humanity with each other ends up being a good thing.

  Intimacy: Form & Content

  One of my old college friends, Emily, came into town recently, and stopped downtown on her way from the airport to have lunch with a mutual friend of ours and his co-worker—who happened also to be my girlfriend, Sarah. When Emily and I met up later that day for dinner, I remarked on how funny it was that she’d already met Sarah before I’d had any chance to introduce them. I remember saying something to the effect of, “It’s cool that you guys got to know each other a little bit.” “Well, I wouldn’t say that I got to know her, per se,” Emily replied. “More like, ‘saw what she’s like’ or something like that. ‘Saw her in action.’ ”

  And that’s when the distinction hit me—

  Having a sense of a person—their disposition, character, “way of being in the world”—and knowing about them—where they grew up, how many siblings they have, what they majored in, where they work—are two rather different things. Just like security, so does intimacy have both form and content.

  “Speed dating” is a kind of fast-paced, highly structured round-robin-style social mixing event that emerged in Beverly Hills in the late 1990s. Each participant has a series of seven-minute conversations, and at the end they mark down on a card which people they’d be interested in meeting again; if there are any mutual matches, the organizers get in touch with the relevant contact information. Though it’s entered into popular parlance, “SpeedDating” (“or any confusingly similar term”) is technically a registered trademark, held by, of all groups, the Jewish organization Aish HaTorah: its inventor, Yaacov Deyo, is a rabbi.

  One of my earliest thoughts about the Turing test was that it’s a kind of speed date: you have five minutes to show another person who you are, to come across as a real, living, breathing, unique and distinct, nonanonymous human being. It’s a tall order. And the stakes in both cases are pretty high.

  A friend of mine recently went to a speed-dating event in New York City. “Well, it was the oddest thing,” he said. “I kept wanting just to, like, banter, you know? To see if there was any chemistry. But all the women just kind of stuck to this script—where are you from, what do you do—like they were getting your stats, sizing you up. But I don’t care about any of that stuff. So after a while I just started giving fake answers, just making stuff up, like. Just to keep it interesting, you know?”

  The strangeness he experienced, and the kinds of “bullet points” that speed dating can frequently devolve into, are so well-known as to have been lampooned by Sex and the City:

  “Hi, I’m Miranda Hobbes.”

  “Dwight Owens; private wealth group at Morgan Stanley; investment management for high-net-worth individuals and a couple pension plans; like my job; been there five years; divorced; no kids; not religious; I live in New Jersey; speak French and Portuguese; Wharton business school; any of this appealing to you?”

  The delivery certainly isn’t.

  People with elaborate checklists of qualities their ideal mate must have frequently put entirely the wrong types of things. This height. This salary. This profession. I’ve seen many a friend wind up, seemingly unsuspecting, with a jerk who nevertheless perfectly matched their description.

  Fed up with the “Dwight Owens”–style, salvo-of-bullet-points approach that kept recurring in early speed-dating events, Yaacov Deyo decided on a simple, blunt solution: to make talking about your job forbidden. People fell back on talking about where they l
ived or where they were from. So he made that forbidden too. He seems charmed and maybe even a little smug enacting the ensuing panic, then breakthrough: “Omigosh, like, what do I talk about?” He laughs. “I can’t talk about what I do for a living, or where I live, and … wow! All of a sudden I have to describe me.” Or: all of a sudden I have to be me, to act like myself instead of describing myself.

  Form and Content in the Turing Test

  The first Loebner Prize competition was held on November 8, 1991, at the Boston Computer Museum. In its first few years, the Loebner Prize gave each program and human confederate a “topic” as a means of limiting the conversation. In some ways, that first contest was a battle between style and content. One of the confederates was Shakespeare expert Cynthia Clay, who was, famously, deemed a computer by three different judges. The consensus seemed to be “No one knows that much about Shakespeare.” (For this reason, Clay took her misclassifications as a compliment.)

  The program behind the topic of “whimsical conversation”—PC Therapist III by Joseph Weintraub—won the Loebner Prize that year, earning the very first Most Human Computer award. As the program practiced it, “whimsical conversation” was not a topic at all, but a manner—a crucial distinction. Weintraub was able to play off of a looseness in the contest rules, the natural behavior patterns of chatbots, and people’s stereotypes about computers and humans all at once. Strategically, it was brilliant. Clay and her fellow confederates, by dutifully and scrupulously providing information to the questions asked, demonstrated their knowledge and understanding—but sometimes in a factual, encyclopedic way commonly associated with computer systems.