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A playful, profound book that is not only a testament to one man's efforts to be deemed more human than a computer, but also a rollicking exploration of what it means to be human in the first place. “Terrific. ... Art and science meet an engaged mind and the friction produces real fire.” —The New Yorker Each year, the AI community convenes to administer the famous (and famously controversial) Turing test, pitting sophisticated software programs against humans to determine if a computer can “think.” The machine that most often fools the judges wins the Most Human Computer Award. But there is also a prize, strange and intriguing, for the “Most Human Human.”
Brian Christian—a young poet with degrees in computer science and philosophy—was chosen to participate in a recent competition. This
A playful, profound book that is not only a testament to one man's efforts to be deemed more human than a computer, but also a rollicking exploration of what it means to be human in the first place. “Terrific. ... Art and science meet an engaged mind and the friction produces real fire.” —The New Yorker Each year, the AI community convenes to administer the famous (and famously controversial) Turing test, pitting sophisticated software programs against humans to determine if a computer can “think.” The machine that most often fools the judges wins the Most Human Computer Award. But there is also a prize, strange and intriguing, for the “Most Human Human.”
Brian Christian—a young poet with degrees in computer science and philosophy—was chosen to participate in a recent competition. This
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the book 1. Introduction: The Most Human Human
I wake up five thousand miles from home in a hotel room with no shower: for the first time in fifteen years, I take a bath. I eat, as is traditional, some slightly ominous-looking tomatoes, some baked beans, and four halves of white toast that come on a tiny metal rack, shelved vertically, like books. Then I step out into the salty air and walk the coastline of the country that invented my language, despite my not being able to understand a good portion of the signs I pass on my way—let agreed, one says, prominently, in large print, and it means nothing to me.
I pause, and stare dumbly at the sea for a moment, parsing and reparsing the sign in my head. Normally these kinds of linguistic curiosities and cultural gaps interest and intrigue me; today, though, they are mostly a cause for concern. In the next two hours I will sit down at a computer and have a series of five- minute instant- message chats with several strangers. At the other end of these chats will be a psychologist, a linguist, a computer scientist, and the host of a popular British technology show. Together they form a judging panel, and my goal in these conversations is one of the strangest things I’ve ever been asked to do.
I must convince them that I’m human. Fortunately, I am human; unfortunately, it’s not clear how much that will help. The Turing Test
Each year, the artificial intelligence (AI) community convenes for the field’s most anticipated and controversial annual event—a competition called the Turing test. The test is named for British mathematician Alan Turing, one of the founders of computer science, who in 1950 attempted to answer one of the field’s earliest questions: Can machines think? That is, would it ever be possible to construct a computer so sophisticated that it could actually be said to be thinking, to be intelligent, to have a mind? And if indeed there were, someday, such a machine: How would we know? Instead of debating this question on purely theoretical grounds, Turing proposed an experiment. A panel of judges poses questions by computer terminal to a pair of unseen correspondents, one a human “confederate,” the other a computer program, and attempts to discern which is which. There are no restrictions on what can be said: the dialogue can range from small talk to the facts of the world (e.g., how many legs ants have, what country Paris is in) to celebrity gossip and heavy-duty philosophy—the whole gamut of human conversation. Turing predicted that by the year 2000, computers would be able to fool 30 percent of human judges after five minutes of conversation, and that as a result “one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”
Turing’s prediction has not come to pass; at the 2008 contest, however, held in Reading, England, the top program came up shy of that mark by just a single vote. The 2009 test in Brighton could be the decisive one. And I am participating in it, as one of four human confederates going head-to-head (head-to-motherboard?) against the top AI programs. In each of several rounds, I, along with the other confederates, will be paired off with an AI program and a judge—and will have the task of convincing the latter that I am, in fact, human.
The judge will talk to one of us for five minutes, then the other, and then has ten minutes to reflect and make his choice about which one of us he believes is the human....
About the Author-
BRIAN CHRISTIAN has publishedwork in The Atlantic, Wired, The Wall Street Journal, and many literary and scientific publications. He has been featured on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” NPR’s “Radiolab,” and “The Charlie Rose Show,” and has lectured at Google, Microsoft, the London School of Economics, and elsewhere. An award-winning poet, Christian holds a degree in philosophy and computer science from Brown University and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. The Most Human Human, a Wall Street Journal bestseller, has been translated into nine languages. Christian lives in Philadelphia.
Reviews-
Starred review from January 3, 2011 In a fast-paced, witty, and thoroughly winning style, Christian documents his experience in the 2009 Turing Test, a competition in which judges engage in five-minute instant-message conversations with unidentified partners, and must then decide whether each interlocutor was a human or a machine. The program receiving the most "human" votes is dubbed the "most human computer," while the person receiving the most votes earns the title of "most human human." Poet and science writer Christian sets out to win the latter title and through his quest, investigates the nature of human interactions, the meaning of language, and the essence of what sets us apart from machines that can process information far faster than we can. Ranging from philosophy through the construction of pickup lines to poetry, Christian examines what it means to be human and how we interact with one another, and with computers as equals—via automated telephone menus and within the medical establishment, for example. This fabulous book demonstrates that we are capable of experiencing and sharing far deeper thoughts than even the best computers—and that too often we fail to achieve the highest level of humanness.
The New Yorker
"Terrific. . . . Art and science meet an engaged mind and the friction produces real fire."
The New York Times Book Review
"Illuminating. . . . An irreverent picaresque. . . . What Christian learns along the way is that if machines win the imitation game as often as they do, it's not because they're getting better at acting human, it's because we're getting worse. . . . As The Most Human Human demonstrates, Christian has taken his own words to heart. An authentic son of [Robert] Frost, he learns by going where he has to go, and in doing so proves that both he and his book deserve their title."
The Wall Street Journal
"Absorbing. . . . Christian covers a great deal of ground with admirable clarity but with a lightness of touch. . . . He also has a real knack for summing up key ideas by applying them to real-life situations. . . . Did Christian become 'The Most Human Human'? You'll have to read the book to find out."
Salon
"Exhilarating. . . . Reading it, I constantly found my mind pinging off of whatever Christian was discussing and into flights of exploratory speculation about the amount of information encoded in the seemingly routine exchanges of small talk or the reasons why it's much harder to tell a false story in reverse chronological order. It's an unusual book whose primary gift lies in distracting you from itself. I'd like to see the computers come up with something like that."
Jon Stewart
"Fascinating."
Financial Times
"Brilliant."
The Columbus Dispatch
"Humorous and thought-provoking. . . . A curious look into the history and potential of artificial intelligence, and a brilliant comparison between artificial intelligence and our natural variety. . . . Christian wants to call attention to how special we are, and his book is a success."
The Onion A. V. Club
"Incredibly engrossing."
The Economist
"Entertaining and informative."
The Boston Globe
"A charming, friendly, and often funny read."
Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams and Ghost
"Immensely ambitious and bold, intellectually provocative, while at the same time entertaining and witty--a delightful book about how to live a meaningful, thriving life."
David Eagleman, author of Sum and Incognito
"A book exploring the wild frontiers of chat-bots is appealing enough; I never expected to discover in its pages such an eye-opening inquest into human imagination, thought, conversation, love and deception. Who would have guessed that the best way to understand humanity was to study its imitators?"
The Times (London)
"Remarkable, enjoyable, heartening. A philosophical joyride connecting the thoughts of Aristotle with David Brent. . . . The day that a machine creates work of such wit and originality, we should all be very worried."
Matthew B. Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft
"This is a strange, fertile, and sometimes beautiful book. . . . Something like this seems to be going on with the computer. Brian Christian writes with a rare combination of what Pascal took to be two contrary mindsets: the spirit of geometry and the spirit of finesse. He takes both the deep limitations and halting progress of artificial intelligence as an occasion for thinking about the most human activity--the art of conversation."
New Statesman
"Lively and thought-stirring. . . . An invaluable sourcebook on computing in modern-day life."
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Fast-paced, witty, and thoroughly winning. . . . This fabulous book demonstrates that we are capable of experiencing and sharing far deeper thoughts than even the best computers--and that too often we fail to achieve the highest level of humanness."
David Shenk, author of The Forgetting, The Immortal Game, and The Genius in All of Us
"This is such an important book, a book I've been waiting and hoping for. Machines are getting so smart that it forces us to take a completely fresh look at what smart is, and at what human is. Brian Christian takes on this very weighty task, and somehow makes it fun. Christian is nimble, insightful, and humble--a very human human, indeed, and one you will like very much."
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