The Most Human Human by Brian Christian Read Free Book Online

something interesting, and very telling: each remark after the first is
only about the previous remark
. The friends’ conversation has become stateless, unanchored from all context, a kind of “Markov chain” of riposte, meta-riposte, meta-meta-riposte. If we can be induced to sink to this level, of course the Turing test can be passed.
    Once again, the scientific perspective on what types of human behavior are imitable shines incredible light on how we conduct our own, human lives. There’s a sense in which verbal abuse is simply
less complex
than other forms of conversation. Seeing how much MGonz’s arguments resemble our own might shame us into shape.
    Retorts, no matter how sharp or stinging, play into chatbots’ hands. In contrast, requests for elaboration, like “In what sense?” and “How so?” turn out to be crushingly difficult for many bots to handle: because elaboration is hard to do when one is working from a prepared script, because such questions rely
entirely
on context for their meaning and, because they extend the relevant conversational history, rather than resetting it.
    In fact, since reading the papers on MGonz, and its transcripts, I find myself much more able to constructively manage heated conversations. Aware of their stateless, knee-jerk character, I recognize that the terse remark I want to blurt has far more to do with some kind of “reflex” to the very last sentence of the conversation than it does with either the actual issue at hand or the person I’m talking to. All of a sudden the absurdity and ridiculousness of this kind of escalation become
quantitatively
clear, and, contemptuously unwilling to act like a bot, I steer myself toward a more “stateful” response: better living through science.
    1. When something online makes me think of a friend I haven’t talked to in a while, and I want to send them a link, I make sure to add some kind of personal flourish, some little verbal fillip to the message beyond just the minimal “hey, saw this and thought of you / [link] / hope all’s well,” or else my message risks a spam-bin fate.
E.g., when I received the other week a short, generically phrased Twitter message from one of the poetry editors of
Fence
magazine saying, “hi, i’m 24/female/horny … i have to get off here but message me on my windows live messenger name: [link],” my instinct wasn’t to figure out how to politely respond that I was flattered but thought it best to keep our relationship professional; it was to hit the “Report Spam” button.
    2.
Sic
. Weintraub’s program, like many that followed it, faked typos.
    3. Such anonymity brings hazard, though, at least as much as serendipity. I read someone’s account of trying out Chatroulette for the first time: twelve of the first twenty video chats he attempted were with men masturbating in front of the camera. For this reason, and because it was more like the Turing test, I stuck to text. Still, my first two interlocutors on Omegle were guys trolling, stiltedly, for cybersex. But the third was a high school student from the suburbs of Chicago: we talked about
Cloud Gate
, the Art Institute, the pros and cons of growing up and moving out. Here was a real person. “You’re normal!!” she wrote, with double exclamation marks; my thought exactly.
    4. Motives range from wanting the children not to put all of their emotional eggs in one basket, to wanting them to branch out and experience new perspectives, to reducing the occasionally harmful social exclusion that can accompany tight bonds.

3. The Migratory Soul
I’m Up
Here
    The Turing test attempts to discern whether computers are, to put it most simply, “like us” or “unlike us”: humans have always been preoccupied with their place among the rest of creation. The development of the computer in the twentieth century may represent the first time that this place has changed.
    The story of the Turing test, of the speculation and enthusiasm and