The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive By Brian Christian

When I read in People Magazine that Elon Musk was reading The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive by Brian Christian, I had to read it. Elon and I have a long and polarized relationship.

You know Elon, right?? (pictured) He dropped out of the Stanford Physics Ph.D. program at the age of 24, and created and sold PayPal for $1.5 billion. Oh, and he invented the Telsa and now builds spaceships.  Anyway, I describe Elon and my relationship as polarized because he’s never heard of me, whereas I am extremely jealous of his brilliance and success, but back to the book. 

The Most Human Human is about Brian Christian’s invitation to serve as a judge in the annual Loebner Prize. This prize goes to the creators of a “chatterbot” computer program designed to simulate a human in small talk, considered by the judges to be the most human-like. In each round, a human judge simultaneously holds computer conversations with a chatterbot and a human via computer. Based upon the responses, the judge must decide which is which. $25,000 is offered for the first chatterbot judges cannot distinguish from a real human and which can convince judges the human is the computer program. $100,000 is the reward for the first chatterbot judges cannot distinguish from a real human. Once this is achieved, the annual competition will end. So far computers have come within one point of winning.

The format is based upon the Turing test, which was introduced by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" which posed an essential concept in the philosophy of artificial intelligence, “Can machines think?”

Christian enters the challenge determined to get “in shape” to not let a computer program fool him into thinking it is human and, in the process, he learns a lot about what makes humans human and comes to the conclusion that if the computer programs win (most sources predict they will eventually), it will not be because computers are getting better at acting human but rather because humans are getting worse at acting human. He points to the computerization of our lives as the major culprit in our dehumanizing, saying “The more helpful our phones get, the harder it is to be ourselves.”

I found it completely clever (human) that one of the best chatterbots created so far defaulted to sarcasm and diversion when it couldn’t follow a conversation. For example, if I said, “So what’s your position on abortion?” or “Do you think Putin will drop the you know what?” the computer might say, “I really don’t want to get into it,” or “That’s a dumb topic. If you can’t think of anything else to talk about, let’s just cut this conversation short.”

So did Brian beat the bots? I guess you’ll just have to read the book, and Elon and I recommend you do.