Book: The Most Human Human

The Turing Test is meant to gauge a machine’s intelligence. The test, as proposed by Alan Turing in 1950, asks for computers to imitate human beings well enough as to believably carry on a conversation with a human, such that the human does not realize he or she is conversing with a machine instead of an actual person.

The Loebner Prize is an annual competition that presents a platform for teams and their chatbots to see how they fare in such an imitation game and to ideally pass the Turing Test. The winner of the Loebner Prize is that bot that is voted to be the most human-like computer.

Brian Christian participated in the 2009 installment of the competition. He did not contribute a chatbot, but rather was one of the human confederates. Just like a software bot, the confederate’s task is of course also to convince the judge of his humanity during their written chats, thus trying to keep them from judging a computer program to seem more human-like than him based on a conversation. As it turns out, being the most convincing human human, has its rewards, too:

But there is also, intriguingly, another title, one given to the confederate who elicited the greatest number of votes and greatest confidence from the judges: the “Most Human Human” award.
One of the first winners, in 1994, was Wired columnist Charles Platt. How’d he do it? By “being moody, irritable, and obnoxious,” he says – which strikes me as not only hilarious and bleak but also, in some deeper sense, a call to arms: How, in fact, do we be the most human humans we can be – not only under the constraints of the test, but in life?

An intriguing question indeed! Competing against software that strives to be as human-like as possible can serve as great motivation to contemplate what exactly it means for a person to come across as a human – other than just being oneself.

Brian Christian’s book The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive examines that question in some depth. Our notion of (artificial) intelligence and valid tests thereof keep changing as computer become able to accomplish tasks that were previously assumed to take real, human intelligence. Chess was a great example of this and so was the game of Jeopardy.

As computers and our capacity to program them and make them smarter improves, the machines appear to be gaining ground. Does that mean it is just a matter of time, until the machines will pass the tests we present or are we able to improve ourselves to stay ahead of them? The author seems to think so:

In an article about the Turing test, Loebner Prize co-founder Robert Epstein wrote, “One thing is certain: whereas the confederates in the competition will never get any smarter, the computer will.” I agree with the latter, and couldn’t disagree more strongly with the former.

The author joined Jon Stewart for a brief segment on The Daily Show to discuss his book, the Loebner Prize and Artificial Intelligence:

It is a brief, but informative conversation. My favorite part occurs around the 2:35 mark. Jon Stewart: “Tell me, how computers have progressed – they’ve been able to, obviously, beat us at chess, and now at Jeopardy … Will they move on … beyond our hobbies? [... or will they always be stuck in these types of games in their capacities?]”

The Most Human Human is a thought-provoking, engaging read – highly recommended.