The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive First Edition Edition

by Brian Christian (Author)

75 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0385533065

ISBN-10: 9780385533065

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The Most Human Human is a provocative, exuberant, and profound exploration of the ways in which computers are reshaping our ideas of what it means to be human. Its starting point is the annual Turing Test, which pits artificial intelligence programs against people to determine if computers can “think.”

Named for computer pioneer Alan Turing, the Turing Test convenes a panel of judges who pose questions—ranging anywhere from celebrity gossip to moral conundrums—to hidden contestants in an attempt to discern which is human and which is a computer. The machine that most often fools the panel wins the Most Human Computer Award. But there is also a prize, bizarre and intriguing, for the Most Human Human.

In 2008, the top AI program came short of passing the Turing Test by just one astonishing vote. In 2009, Brian Christian was chosen to participate, and he set out to make sure Homo sapiens would prevail.

The author’s quest to be deemed more human than a computer opens a window onto our own nature. Interweaving modern phenomena like customer service “chatbots” and men using programmed dialogue to pick up women in bars with insights from fields as diverse as chess, psychiatry, and the law, Brian Christian examines the philosophical, biological, and moral issues raised by the Turing Test.

One central definition of human has been “a being that could reason.” If computers can reason, what does that mean for the special place we reserve for humanity?

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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.)
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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

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Product details

Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Doubleday; First Edition edition (March 1, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780385533065
ISBN-13: 978-0385533065
ASIN: 0385533063
Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.2 x 9.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 75 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #833,214 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #266 in Books > Textbooks > Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence
- #427 in Books > Computers & Technology > Computer Science > Human-Computer Interaction
- #707 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Movements > Humanism

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Monterey resident

Absolutely fascinating book!

January 2, 2018

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How refreshing to read a book that uses vocabulary targeted towards an audience with more than a 6th grade education! The author goes off on lots of tangents and although I usually prefer to read fiction, I found myself unable to put the book down. The question he tries to answer is one I had never thought about and is apparently much more difficult to answer than one would expect. If you are looking for fluffy escapism, this book is not for you. The book will definitely get you thinking.

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Massimo Pigliucci

The problem with the Turing test

October 7, 2011

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[This is an excerpt from a full review to appear in Skeptical Inquirer] Mathematician Alan Turing is famous for a number of things, but probably the one that comes most easily to mind is the famous Turing test, a simple procedure for allegedly determining whether a computer is thinking like a human being -- or at least, whether a computer can effectively fool us into such a conclusion. Turing predicted that by the year 2000 computers would be able to trick human judges into thinking they were talking to a fellow human instead of a machine at least 30% of the time, if the conversation lasted for about five minutes. This has always seemed to me to put the bar so low as to make the entire enterprise spectacularly uninteresting. Sure enough, reading Brian Christian's The Most Human Human confirmed my impression that the so-called Turing test is one of the most hyped ideas in both artificial intelligence and philosophy of mind. The issue, as Christian makes abundantly clear throughout the book, is not whether programmers can devise a clever enough trick that can fool some people some of the time (and for a short period at that), but whether it is possible, or even if it makes sense to try, to equip computers with something akin to human intelligence and thought (please notice that I do not subscribe to non-physicalist views of human consciousness). Christian seems convinced that the key to artificial intelligence is to be found in the implications of Shannon's information theory, which deals among other things with the compression of semantic content. As Christian puts it at the end of the book: "If a computer could ... compress English optimally, it'd know enough about the language that it would know the language. We'd have to consider it intelligent -- in the human sense of the word" (emphasis in the original). Well, is some sense of knowing and intelligence this may be true. But would we have succeeded in creating an artificial intelligence substantially analogous to the human variety? Would that computer be conscious of knowing the English language? There are serious reasons to doubt it. More likely, we would have created something different, and we might need to broaden our very understanding of what "thinking" means.

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A great analysis of language use and what it reveals about us.

December 8, 2017

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Mr. Christian’s participation in the most human computer event is described and analyzed, leading to profound revelations about the nature of communication and human-ness.

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Matt Musselman

An entertaining, englightening, and stimulating read.

June 14, 2011

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What obviously started based on the premise of entering to be a confederate in the annual Loebner Prize (based on the Turing Test), where the author would be a human trying to differentiate himself from various chat software programs attempting to pass as human, and what it means to win the award of being "the most human human" in this contest, Brian Christian delves into a delightful examination of:
- What differentiates human thinking from computer "thinking"? Or from the cognitive processes of non-human animals?
- How does human thinking work?
- What makes for interesting conversation? When do conversations work or not work? What conversations (and thus people) are most memorable? When are our conversations more robotic in nature?
- What aspects of language make it a uniquely human endeavour?
- What is the nature of emotion? Creativity? Poetry? Art?

That Christian was able to explore all this while also spicing the mix with terrific references to source material from Aristophanes and Plato to grunge music, Heisenberg, Hofstadter, and David Foster Wallace, Cameron Crowe films, Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov, Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, and Bertrand Russell, Isaac Newton, Ezra Pound and Allen Ginsberg, the music of Sting and Feist and Bach, TED Talks, Terminator and The Matrix and Glengarry Glen Ross, Salvador Dali and Marcel Duchamp, Freakonomics, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. . . . I not only learned a lot, but also felt as if I had just walked into a room full of old friends, while also meeting some new friends to get to know.

A terrific, fun, and enlightening read.

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maurypb

The Most Human Human Review

May 31, 2011

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I enjoyed this book, and I recommend it highly, if you're interested in consciousness, "mind vs brain" stuff, perception of art, language and/or computer science. He discusses the ever changing definition of what it means to be conscious, in the light of ever increasing computational power. He argues, quite convincingly, that the things that have been considered uniquely in the realm of we humans is being whittled away, quite quickly by machine ability.

The best part of the book is the first few chapters, which expose his thesis, and has a highly coherent nature. The later chapters are interesting and all valuable, but they are more like a set of shorter, independent and more varied thoughts, all pointing towards the original theme.

Mr. Christian often quotes Douglas Hofstadter's "Godel Escher and Bach" throughout - which is also a very good read. If you liked that, you'll also like this one, as they seem to draw from the same vein in many respects.

I'd certainly enjoy having coffee with Mr. Christian sometime, and see how far "out of book" we can get, and how fast. ("Out of book" is a term he used, to mean exhausting the well worn conversation templates, and getting into new, creative ground).

In the end, and enjoyable read, well worth the time and price.

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