The Most Human Human

by Brian Christian

The Dangers of Purpose

  The art of general conversation, for example, brought to perfection in the French salons of the 18th century, was still a living tradition forty years ago. It was a very exquisite art, bringing the highest faculties into play for the sake of something completely evanescent. But who in our age cares for anything so leisurely?

  … The competitive habit of mind easily invades regions to which it does not belong. Take, for example, the question of reading.

  –BERTRAND RUSSELL

  For some reason I begin enjoying books much less when I’m almost done with them, because some inner drive starts yearning for “completion.” The beginning of the book is about pleasure and exploration, the end is about follow-through and completeness, which interest me much less.10

  Somehow I’m particularly susceptible to this notion of purpose or project completion. Some weeks ago a few friends of mine all met up at one of our houses, and we’d decided to walk to a bar from there. As we’re putting on our coats, Led Zeppelin’s “Ramble On” comes on the stereo and someone spontaneously begins jumping around the room, flailing at an air guitar; one by one, we all join in. Yet the whole time I’m anxious to go, thinking, C’mon guys, we’re wasting time, we were supposed to be hanging out by now! Obviously, we already were.

  “In our everyday life we are usually trying to do something, trying to change something into something else, or trying to attain something,” I read recently in the book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. “When you practice zazen you should not try to attain anything.” But there’s the paradox waiting around the corner, which is to treat the mind state of non-attainment as itself the goal to be attained … It’s a bit like trying to look at the floaters in your own eyes, those little spots you see in your peripheral vision when you look at a uniform blue sky, which of course always slide away when you try to center them in your view. You go directly after non-attainment and always miss, of course.

  The mind trips itself up, because as soon as you start saying, “Good job, self! I succeeded at doing something non-teleological,” you fail on that very score.

  There was a commercial during the 1990s where a man puts on a pair of headphones and lies down on a couch. He’s got a relaxation tape, and he presses the play button—all of a sudden a harsh Germanic voice comes on: “Commence relaxation, NOW!” The man stiffens into a “relaxed” posture on the couch. Regarding non-goal-directed behavior as, itself, a goal will get you into these sorts of problems.

  As twentieth-century philosopher Bertrand Russell argues: “Men as well as children have need of play, that is to say, of periods of activity having no purpose.” And Aristotle, who stressed the “teleology” of everything from men to microbes, went out of his way to describe the best form of friendship as one with no particular purpose or goal. Dolphins, allegedly, and bonobos are the only animals besides humans that have sex “for fun.” We also tend to regard them as the smartest animals besides ourselves. Indeed, it seems that the list of “smartest” animals and the list of animals with some form of “play” or recreation in their daily lives are more or less the same list.

  One of the odd things about domain-general chatbots at the Loebner Prize competitions—programs that, owing to the setup of the Turing test, must be jacks of all trades and masters of none—is this “What’s the point?” question. And it’s this question that contributes to what seems, at times, uncanny about them; it’s also what makes them so underfunded. In contrast, their cousins, the “expert systems,” the conversational equivalents of the hammer or the saw—you buy airline tickets, file a customer service complaint, etc.—are becoming increasingly richly funded, and are increasingly being rolled out into commercial applications.

  Philip Jackson, the 2009 contest’s organizer, explains that one of the reasons the Turing test has been such a resilient one is that programs that do well often get co-opted by larger corporations, which then put the technology to some particular use. Some critics of the Loebner Prize describe its programmers as “hobbyists” rather than professionals; this isn’t true on the whole. Cleverbot’s author, Rollo Carpenter, who won the Most Human Computer award in 2005 and 2006, contributed the AI for the “interrogation” stages in 221b, the 2009 computer game whose release accompanied the most recent Sherlock Holmes film. The Most Human Computer award winner from 2008, Elbot’s programmer, Fred Roberts, is part of the company behind the customer service chatbot at the IKEA website, among a number of others. These are professionals indeed: it’s just that the bots that make money are “domain specific” (divulge clues to move the game narrative ahead, point the user to the curtains department), and the bots that win Turing tests are “domain general,” conversing, as humans do, about whatever comes up. Jackson explains that companies and research-granting agencies appear to be having a hard time thinking of a reason—yet, anyway—to direct money into developing domain-general bots, conversational “universal machines.”

  What would be their purpose?

  1. But what if that is humans’ purpose? That process of definition, the very process of finding a purpose? Vonnegut writes, “Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly / Man got to sit and wonder, ‘Why, why, why?’ ” This would make the existentialists feel good, the way Aristotle’s decision that contemplation is the highest activity of man made Aristotle feel good, but in this case it would undermine their argument.

  2. “I do not challenge the statement that the most complex creature has tended to increase in elaboration through time, but I fervently deny that this limited little fact can provide an argument for general progress as a defining thrust of life’s history.” The basic argument is that while mean complexity has gone up, modal complexity hasn’t—most of the life on this planet is still, and always will be, bacterial. And because life can’t really get simpler than that, its fundamentally directionless proliferation of variation and diversity is mistaken for progress. In Gould’s analogy, a wildly staggering drunk will always fall off the curb into the street: not because he’s in any way driven toward it, but because any time he staggers the other way, into the buildings, he simply ricochets.

  3. I live in Seattle, which, in the wintertime, has a near-epidemic prevalence of vitamin D deficiency.

  4. I like imagining Descartes writing in his Meditations how he is doubting the existence of his body—and then putting down his pen and getting up to go pee and eat lunch.

  5. It’s possible that this typo streak is not simply sloppy typing but actually a deliberate attempt to make things tougher for a software sentence parser.

  6. Ludwig Wittgenstein uses the word “game” as an example in Philosophical Investigations of a word that can seemingly never be adequately defined.

  7. Bertrand Russell: “Unless a man has been taught what to do with success after getting it, the achievement of it must inevitably leave him a prey to boredom.”

  8. As the volume Voice Communication Between Humans and Machines, put together by the National Academy of Sciences, admits: “Further research effort is needed in detecting this type of ‘none of the above’ response.”

  9. (Isn’t that a little late? Shouldn’t the programmers have had time to deal with possible rule changes?)

  10. I wonder if part of this is a kind of “notation bias”—I use a website to keep track of the books I read and when, in case I need to go back and reference anything, and it specifies a list of “Read” books and books I’m “Currently Reading.” If instead there was simply one list, called “Books I’ve, at the Very Least, Begun,” my life might be easier.

  7. Barging In

  Listeners keep up with talkers; they do not wait for the end of a batch of speech and interpret it after a proportional delay, like a critic reviewing a book. And the lag between speaker’s mouth and listener’s mind is remarkably short.

  –STEVEN PINKER

  Spontaneity; Flow

  “Well, I mean, you know, there are different levels of difficulty, right? I mean, one obvious level of difficulty is that, y
ou know, ‘be yourself’ would be an injunction in the first place, right, which suggests, of course, if you have to be told to be yourself, that you could in some way fail to be yourself.” Bernard Reginster, professor of philosophy at Brown University, chuckles. This tickles his philosopher’s sense of humor. “But that’s paradoxical! Because if you’re not going to be yourself, then what else are you going to be? You know? So there’s already something sort of on the face of it peculiar, in the idea that you should be told, or that you could be exhorted, or enjoined, to be yourself—as if you could fail!”

  One of the traditional ideas, he says, about what it means to “just be yourself”—the advice and direction that the Loebner Prize organizers give the confederates each year—is to be your true self, that is, “to figure out what your quote-unquote true self is supposed to be, and then [to become it] by peeling away all the layers of socialization, so to speak, and then trying to live your life in a way that would be true to that true self, so to speak.” That philosopher’s tic of putting everything in quotation marks—because to use a word is, in a way, to endorse it—tips Reginster’s hand, and paves the way for the counterargument long before it comes. “Now, the big problem with that idea,” he says, “is that a great deal of fairly recent developmental psychology and a great deal of research in psychiatry and psychoanalysis and so forth has suggested, at least, that the idea that there would be a true ‘you’ that comes into the world unaffected, unadulterated by the influence of the social environment in which you develop, is a myth. That in fact you are, as it were, socialized from the get-go. So that if you were to peel away the layers of socialization, it’s not as if what would be left over would be the true you. What would be left over would be nothing.”

  Reginster echoes here Turing’s words in response to the “Lovelace Objection” that computers are incapable of “originality”: How sure are we that we can? They echo, also, Turing’s less confident and slightly more uneasy rhetorical question in that same 1950 paper:

  The “skin of an onion” analogy is also helpful. In considering the functions of the mind or the brain we find certain operations which we can explain in purely mechanical terms. This we say does not correspond to the real mind: it is a sort of skin which we must strip off if we are to find the real mind. But then in what remains we find a further skin to be stripped off, and so on. Proceeding in this way do we ever come to the “real” mind, or do we eventually come to the skin which has nothing in it?

  Without this notion of an inner-sanctum core of self, can any sense be made of the “just be yourself” advice? Reginster thinks so. “The injunction to be yourself is essentially an injunction no longer to care or worry about what other people think, what other people expect of you, and so on and so forth, and is essentially a matter of becoming sort of unreflective or unself-conscious or spontaneous in the way in which you go about things.”

  It’s interesting that the human ability to be self-aware, self-conscious, to think about one’s own actions, and indeed about one’s own thoughts, seems to be a part of our sense of unique “intelligence,” yet so many of life’s most—you name it: productive, fun, engaging, competent—moments come when we abandon such hall-of-mirrors frivolities and just, à la Nike, do things. I am thinking here of sex, of athletics, of the performing arts, of what we call the “zone” and what psychologists call “flow”—the state of complete immersion in an activity. When we are acting, you might very well say, “like an animal”—or even “like a machine.”

  Indeed, “The ego falls away,” writes Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, popularizer of the psychological notion of “flow.” According to Csikszentmihalyi, there are several conditions that must be met for flow to happen. One of these, he says, is “immediate feedback.”

  Long Distance

  At Christmas this past year, my aunt’s cell phone rings and it’s my uncle, calling from Iraq. He’s in the Marine reserves, on his second tour of duty. As the phone makes the rounds of the family members, I keep thinking how incredible and amazing technology is—he is calling us, live, from a war, to wish us Merry Christmas—how technology changes the dynamics of soldier-family intimacy! In the days of letter writing, communication was batch-like, with awkward waits; now we are put directly in contact and that awkward waiting and turn-taking is gone and we can really talk—

  The phone comes to me and I exclaim, “Hi! Merry Christmas!”

  Silence.

  It jars me, my enthusiasm met with seemingly no reaction, and I become self-conscious—am I perhaps not so high on his list of family members he’s excited to talk to? Then, a beat later, he finally comes out with his own, albeit slightly less effusive “Merry Christmas!” Thrown off, I fumble, “It’s great to be able to talk to you when you’re all the way over there.”

  Again silence. No response. Suddenly nervous and uncomfortable, I think, “Didn’t we have more rapport than this?” Everything I want to say or ask suddenly feels trivial, inconsequential, labored. Like a comedian left hanging without a laugh at the end of a joke—it takes mere tenths of a second—I feel that I’m floundering, that I’m wasting his time. I’m wasting his time during a war. I need to hand the phone off pronto. So when he finally replies, “Yeah, it’s great to be able to talk to you when you’re all the way over there,” I mumble a “Well, I won’t hold you up—oh, here’s so-and-so! Talk to you soon!” and awkwardly hand it away.

  Answering Porously

  A few months later I’m doing a phone interview for a group of booksellers in some of this book’s very early-stage PR. The questions are straightforward enough, and I’m not having any trouble coming up with the answers, but what I find myself struggling with is the length of the answers: with something as complex as a book, everything has a very short, sound-bite answer, a short, anecdotal answer, a long, considered answer, and a very long, comprehensive answer. I have these conversations all the time, and for the most part I have two main ways of making the answers “site-specific.” One is to watch the listener’s face for signs of interest or disinterest and adjust accordingly; the other is to make the answer porous, to leave tiny pauses, where the listener can either jump in, or redirect, or just let me keep going. With my barista, I begin with the sound-bite answer and happily get eschatological with her as she jumps in and tells me with a half smirk that the “machines” can “bring it” and that she’s “totally prepared to eat [her] cats” in any kind of siege scenario. With some of my more academic-leaning acquaintances, I watch them looking quizzical and concentrated and not much inclined to interject anything until I reel out the full story, with all its nuances and qualifiers in place.

  On the phone with the booksellers I of course can’t see their faces; in fact I don’t even know how many people “they” are on the other end. When I proffer those “quarter-note rests” to prompt either the expectant “huh’s” and “yeah’s” that spur a tale on, or the contented ones that wrap it up, I hear nothing. If I stretch it to a “half-note rest,” they assume I’m done and ask me a new question. I try splitting the difference; then we both jump back in at the same time. A guy can’t catch a break—or more accurately might be he can’t get someone else to catch his breaks. Somehow the timing ballet that feels like second nature in person seems consistently—here, and as a general rule—to break down over the phone. I do the best I can, but it feels, somehow, solitary—

  Computability Theory vs. Complexity Theory

  The first branch of computer science theory was what’s come to be known as “computability theory,” a field that concerns itself with theoretical models of computing machines and the theoretical limits of their power. It’s this branch of theory in which Turing made some of his greatest contributions: in the 1930s and ’40s, physical computing machines were so fledgling that it made sense to think idealistically about them and the purely theoretical extents and limits of their potential.

  Ignoring the gap between theory and practice has its drawbacks, of course.
As Dave Ackley writes, “Computability theory doesn’t care a whit how long a computation would take, only whether it’s possible or not … Take a millisecond or take a millennium, it’s all the same to computability theory.”

  Computer scientists refer to certain problems as “intractable”—meaning the correct answer can be computed, but not quickly enough to be of use. Intractable problems blur the line between what computers “can” and “cannot” do. For instance, a magic, oracular machine that can predict the future—yet works slower than real time—is a machine which, quite literally, can not predict the future.1

  As it turns out, however, intractability has its uses. Combination locks, for instance, are not impossible to open: you can just try every combination until you hit upon the correct one. Rather, they’re intractable, because the time it would take you to do that would get you caught and/or simply not be worth whatever was behind the lock. Similarly, computer data encryption hinges on the fact that prime numbers can be multiplied into large composite numbers faster than composite numbers can be factored back into their primes. The two operations are both perfectly computable, but the second happens to be exponentially slower—making it intractable. This is what makes online security, and online commerce, possible.

  The next generation of computer theorists after Turing, in the 1960s and ’70s, began to develop a branch of the discipline, called complexity theory, that took such time-and-space constraints into account. As computer theorist Hava Siegelmann of the University of Massachusetts explains, this more “modern” theory deals not only “with the ultimate power of a machine, but also with its expressive power under constraints on resources, such as time and space.”

  Michael Sipser’s textbook Introduction to the Theory of Computation, considered one of the bibles of theoretical computer science, and the textbook I myself used in college, cautions, “Even when a problem is decidable and thus computationally solvable in principle, it may not be solvable in practice if the solution requires an inordinate amount of time or memory.” Still, this is the introduction to the book’s final section, which my senior-year theory course only touched on briefly in the semester’s final weeks.