The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive [Paperback]

Brian Christian (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 6, 2012 | ISBN-10: 0307476707 | ISBN-13: 978-0307476708

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 playful, profound book is not only a testament to his 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. 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. (Mar.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Each year humans and computers square off for the Turing test, which Christian describes as a kind of speed dating via instant messaging, with five minutes to prove which is human. In 2009, Christian traveled to Brighton, England, to compete in a contest matching four humans and four computers. Christian chronicles his preparation and time spent devising strategies to trump the chatbot computers that can imitate humans. Along the way, he draws on philosophy, neurology, linguistics, and computer science, recalling chess master Garry Kasparov losing a match to IBM�s Deep Blue computer and more recent developments in artificial intelligence. He explores how computers have challenged our bias toward the left hemisphere of the brain (logic) versus the right hemisphere (emotions) and how he and others have come to a deeper appreciation of emotional intelligence. He laments how so many jobs have trained employees with limited scripts that render them human chatbots. Christian intersperses interviews and musings on poetry and literature, observations on computer science, and excerpts from post-Turing test conversations for a fascinating exploration of what it means to be human. This book will surely change the way readers think about their conversations. --Vanessa Bush --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (March 6, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307476707
• ISBN-13: 978-0307476708
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #395,183 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Brian Christian is the author of The Most Human Human, which was named a Wall Street Journal bestseller and a New Yorker favorite book of 2011, and has been translated into ten languages. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, The Guardian, The Paris Review, Gizmodo, AGNI, Gulf Coast, and Best New Poets, and in scientific journals such as Cognitive Science. Christian has been featured on The Charlie Rose Show and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and has lectured at Google, Microsoft, the Santa Fe Institute, and the London School of Economics. His work has won several awards, including fellowships at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, publication in Best American Science & Nature Writing, and an award from the Academy of American Poets. Born in Wilmington, Delaware, Christian holds degrees in philosophy, computer science, and poetry from Brown University and the University of Washington. He lives in San Francisco.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 52 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Understanding Artificial Intelligence and human interaction March 8, 2011

By William Bolen

Format:Hardcover

Excellent, well written book on computers that gives a different perspective. After watching "Watson" win on jeopardy, I was amazed at the ability of the computer to seemingly think about endless trivia. Calculations happen at warp speed but it is still hard to imagine that a machine can seem to imitate human thought. Mr Christian does a marvelous job explaining the history of AI, how computers really work to simulate human thought and what computers teach us about ourselves. His prose is clear and concise making for a very enjoyable read. Very well done! Highly recommended.

32 of 36 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Art and Science of Conversation March 5, 2011

By Teknisk Läsare

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book is wonderfully readable, timely, informative and intriguing. The author makes potentially difficult subjects such as artificial intelligence and super-computer technologies accessible and entertaining. We learn how even the most sophisticated and complex machines humans can create, struggle mightily to do a simple, basic human activity - engage in conversations.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Understanding How We Think and How Computers Do Not April 24, 2011

By R. Hardy HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

You say you are a human. Now, prove it. Wait, wait - it's too easy to point to your face or to perform a tap dance as you sing "Bicycle Built for Two." That will not do at all. You must, instead, at your computer terminal type in your part of a conversation that will show to the other conversationalist that you are not yourself a computer. And you will be competing with computers who have been programmed to try to prove that they are humans. This is the basis for the Loebner Prize, a controversial annual competition within the artificial intelligence community. A panel of judges has a series of five-minute-long conversations via screen and keyboard; at the other end of the conversation might be a computer programmed to pretend to be a human or it might be a human trying to dissuade the judges that they are typing to a computer. The judges, of course, don't know beforehand who is who (or, I suppose, what is what), and vote for the conversations that seem most human to them. The Most Human Computer Award, a research grant, goes to the programmers of the best computer conversationalist. But oddly, there is a Most Human Human award for the human who did the best job of making the judges think they were typing to a human. In 2009, Brian Christian won the award, and he has written about it in _The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive_ (Doubleday). It is a curious look into the history and potential of artificial intelligence, and a brilliant comparison between artificial intelligence and our natural variety. Christian may have won a prize demonstrating his humanness, but confirms his victory in this humane, humorous, and thought-provoking book. "In a sense," he tells us, "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."

The Loebner Prize grew out of the Turing Test. Alan Turing was a brilliant British mathematician and codebreaker who in 1950 wrote about the test and predicted that it would be but fifty years before a computer could play the imitation game so well that the average interrogator could not tell it from a human. He was overoptimistic; programs competing for the Loebner Prize are doing better and better, and although they are not yet conversing as well as humans, to read Christian's book is to be convinced that someday it is going to happen. There are manuals to tell programmers how best to make conversation realistic, but Christian discovers there are no such guides to tell humans how to show themselves human. He talks with former competitors (and seems to have a collegial relationship with the humans who were in the tests with him) to get advice. Much of the book involves his interviews with linguists, information theorists, philosophers, and even lawyers about what the Turing Test means, and thereby what it means to be human, and the best ways to show it. And whatever it is that computers do, it is not thinking like we do. For instance, there is a conversational program called Cleverbot, which has been awarded prizes in the competition. It has a website, and not only can humans visit it and engage in conversation, Cleverbot borrows from what they tell it. It takes samples of these conversations and from the samples it makes its own answers and remarks. Since Cleverbot is an amalgamation of conversations, even though it can crunch a huge database of words and phrases actually used by humans, it doesn't do too well with even the most basic of conversation starters. "Where are you from?" I asked, and it said, "I don't know."

That's a true answer, of course! None of the computer programs comes close to knowing anything. Christian often asks us to look at an example of successful artificial intelligence, Deep Blue which defeated Garry Kasparov in chess in 1997. There is no doubt that the computer was playing chess. It might even be said to be planning moves or playing aggressively. But it had no idea what it was doing; it could not tell you what a pawn was, nor could it feel any thrill of victory. No conversation programs have any idea what they are doing, either; they are all simulating conversation. Some of the conversational give-and-takes reproduced here are just clunkers, remarks no human would make, but there are others that are surprisingly life-like. They are really conversations, just like Deep Blue was really playing chess, although the conversational computers are not nearly so good at their job as Deep Blue was at its job. It is comforting, in a way, that computers are so bad at something we take for granted, just chatting. Christian wants to call attention to how special we are, and his book is a success, showing that, among other things, humans can take into account context, allusion, and metaphor, which computers cannot. Even more important, when humans don't understand what has been said, they don't have to risk saying something stupid in response; they can ask questions to aid understanding, but computers have no understanding to be aided. It would be so fascinating to hear what Turing would say about these machines, or about the next generation of them that really is going to be able to converse with some sort of naturalness. What would Turing think, for instance, if Cleverbot turned really clever and sampled its huge database of conversations so well that it really was a good conversation partner? It's hard to believe that Turing would think that such successful sampling would actually be thinking. We will have reliable conversational computers sometime fairly soon; I predict that at that point, we will still be asking if computers are ever going to be able to think.