The Most Human Human

by Brian Christian

  Pound referred to poetry as “original research” in language. When I think about how one might judge the world’s best writers, I keep gravitating to the idea that we’d want to look at who changed the language the most. You can barely speak without uttering Shakespeare coinages, like “bated breath,” “heart of hearts,” “good riddance,” “household words,” “high time,” “Greek to me,” “live-long day,” the list goes on.

  I wonder if bots will be able to pass the Turing test before they make that “transition from imitator to innovator,” as Kasparov puts it—before they begin not merely to follow but to lead. Before they make a contribution to the language. Which most of us don’t think about, but it’s part of what we do. “The highest form of warfare is attacking strategy itself,” says Sun Tzu. The great chess players change the game; the great artists change their mediums; the most important places, events, and people in our lives change us.

  As it turns out, though, you don’t have to be Shakespeare to change your language. In fact, quite the opposite: if meaning lies even partially in usage, then you subtly alter the language every time you use it. You couldn’t leave it intact if you tried.

  Treadmills

  “Retarded” used to be a polite word; it was introduced to replace “idiot,” “imbecile,” and “moron,” which had once, themselves, been polite terms. Linguists call this process the “euphemism treadmill.” Ironically, to use “retarded” as a way of disparaging a person or idea is more offensive than to use “imbecilic” or “moronic”: terms ditched—for being too offensive—in favor of “retarded.” This lexical switch obviously has not succeeded in the long term. When White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in a 2009 strategy meeting dubbed a proposal that displeased him “retarded,” it prompted calls among prominent Republicans for his resignation, and (in lieu of resignation) a personal apology to the chairman of the Special Olympics. In May of 2010, the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee approved a bill called Rosa’s Law that would strike “retarded” from all federal language, replacing it with “intellectually disabled.” The treadmill continues.

  A similar process happens in reverse—the “dysphemism treadmill”—with offensive words; they gradually lose their harshness, and have to be replaced every so often with new abrasives. Some words that are today considered perfectly acceptable, even endearingly inoffensive, or quaint—e.g., “scumbag”—were originally quite explicit: in its original usage, the term meant “condom.” As recently as 1998 the New York Times was still refusing to print the word, as in, “Mr. Burton’s staff today defended his comments, including the use of a vulgarity for a condom to describe the President.” But increasing numbers of readers, unaware of the term’s etymology—in fact, only a handful of modern dictionaries include reference to condoms in the word’s definition—were left scratching their heads. By 2006, just eight years later, the paper nonchalantly included the word in a crossword puzzle (clue: “Scoundrel”), prompting outrage—but only among few. The word’s origins were news even to puzzle editor and renowned word-guru Will Shortz: “The thought never crossed my mind this word could be controversial.”

  Other treadmills exist: for instance, slang terms and baby names. Slang invented by an insider group gets picked up by outsider groups, creating the persistent need for new slang to reinforce the insider group’s cohesion. In Freakonomics, economist Steven Levitt chronicles the process by which baby names percolate through society, from the upper economic classes to the lower ones. Parents often want their child’s name to have a ring of success or distinction, and so they look to the names of slightly more successful families; however, this very process begins to deplete the name’s cachet, and so the demand shifts gradually and perpetually onto new “high-end” names.

  Linguist Guy Deutscher charts two others in The Unfolding of Language. The first is the perpetual pull of eloquence and push of efficiency. As he notes, the phrase “up above” has been compacted and elaborated so many times that its etymology is the hopelessly redundant “up on by on up,” and likewise some French speakers now say “au jour d’aujourd’hui”: “on the day of on-the-day-of-this-day.” The second is the constant invention of new metaphors to capture new facets of human experience in language—meanwhile, familiar metaphors are passing, through sheer use, from aptness to popularity to cliché. From there, the fact that it is a metaphor is slowly forgotten, the original image at the heart of the term becoming a mere fossil of etymology. For instance, Latin speakers needed a term to describe the relationship they had with their dining partners, the folks they broke bread with: the custom of simply calling such people one’s “with-breads,” or (in Latin) “com-panis,” caught on, a phrasing that eventually became our word “companion.” Likewise, as misfortunate events were believed in the sixteenth century to have astrological roots, speakers of Old Italian took to calling such an event a “bad-star,” or “dis-astro”: hence “disaster.”

  The language is constantly dying, and constantly being born. English poet John Keats asked that his tombstone read simply, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water”: a comment on the ephemerality of life. In the long run, all writing is in water: the language itself changes steadily over time. All texts have a half-life of intelligibility before they must be resuscitated through translation.

  Language will never settle down, it will never stabilize, it will never find equilibrium. Perhaps part of what makes the Turing test so tricky is that it’s a battle on shifting ground. Unlike chess, with its fixed rules and outcomes, language—ever changing—is not amenable to being “solved.” As ELIZA’s creator, Joseph Weizenbaum, writes, “Another widespread, and to me surprising, reaction to the ELIZA program was the spread of a belief that it demonstrated a general solution to the problem of computer understanding of natural language. [I have] tried to say that no general solution to that problem [is] possible, i.e., … even people are not embodiments of any such general solution.”

  The Observer Effect

  You can’t take the temperature of a system without the thermometer itself becoming part of the system and contributing its own temperature, in some degree, to its reading. You can’t check a tire’s pressure without letting some of that pressure out—namely, into the gauge. And you can’t check a circuit without some of its current flowing into the meter, or vice versa. As Heisenberg famously showed, measuring an electron’s position, by bouncing a photon off of it, perturbs the very thing you sought to measure through the act of measurement. Scientists call this the “observer effect.”

  Likewise, you can’t ask a friend if they’d like to go out to dinner without implying the extent to which you want to go out to dinner, and thus biasing their answer. Polling studies and eyewitness testimony studies show that the wording of questions biases someone’s response—“About how fast were the cars going when they collided into each other?” produces lower estimates than “About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?” Asking “Do you approve of the job the president is doing?” receives many more affirmatives than asking “Do you approve of the job the president is doing, or not?” The order of questions matters too: asking someone about their overall life satisfaction and then their financial satisfaction produces some limited degree of correlation, but asking first about their finances and then about their life overall magnifies that correlation tremendously.

  Computer programming is largely based on the “repeatability” of its responses; as most programmers can attest, a bug that is unrepeatable is also for the most part unfixable. This is part of why computers behave so much better after a reboot than after days of continuous use, and so much better when first purchased than after several years. These “blank-slate” states are the ones most encountered, and therefore most polished, by the programmers. The longer a computer system is active, the more unique its state tends to become. By and large this is true of people too—except people can’t reboot.

  When I debug a program, I
expect to re-create the exact same behavior a number of times, testing out revisions of the code and undoing them where necessary. When I query a computer system, I expect not to alter it. In contrast, human communication is irrevocable. Nothing can be unsaid. (Consider a judge laughably asking the jury to “forget” a piece of testimony.) It is also, in this way, unrepeatable—because the initial conditions can never be re-created.

  “Hold still, lion!” writes poet Robert Creeley. “I am trying / to paint you / while there’s time to.” Part of what I love so much about people is that they never hold still. As you are getting to know them, they are changing—in part due to your presence. (In conversation with one of these PARRY-style personalities, or reading Racter, or watching a video demonstration of a bot in action, I have quite the inverse feeling. I can’t get the damn thing to move.) In some sense my mind goes to Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2—a series of quick, overlapping sketches of a thing in motion, creating a kind of palimpsest, which scandalized a public accustomed to realism in portraiture. “An explosion in a shingle factory,” wrote the appalled New York Times critic Julian Street, and the piece became a lightning rod for outrage and mockery alike. Somehow, though, there seems something profoundly true (and “realistic”) about a human subject that refuses to sit still for the painter, who must aim to capture their essence via gait rather than figure.

  Part of what we have invented the Turing machine–style digital computer for is its reliability, its repeatability, its “stillness.” When, in recent years, we have experimented with “neural network” models, which mimic the brain’s architecture of massive connectivity and parallelism instead of strict, serial, digital rule following, we have still tended to keep the neuron’s amazing plasticity in check. “When the [synaptic] weights [of a network of virtual neurons] are considered constant (after or without a process of adaptation) the networks can perform exact computations,” writes Hava Siegelmann. Virtual neurons can be controlled in this way, with strict periods of time in which they are permitted to change and adapt. The human brain has no such limits, owing to what neuroscientists call “synaptic plasticity.” Every time neurons fire, they alter the structure of their connections to one another.

  In other words, a functioning brain is a changing brain. As Dave Ackley puts it, “You must be impacted by experience, or there is no experience.” This is what makes good conversations, and good living, risky. You can’t simply “get to know” a person without, to some degree, changing them—and without, to some degree, becoming them.

  I remember first coming to understand that owing to the electrically repellant properties of the atom, matter can never actually touch other matter. The notion brought with it the icy chill of solipsism: the self as a kind of hermetically sealed tomb.

  Sort of. Someone may not ever quite be able to get to the outside of you. But it doesn’t take much—merely to be perceived, or thought of, alters the other’s brain—to make it inside, to where the self is, and change something there, however small.

  Another way to think about it, as you levitate and hover around the room on an angstrom-thick cushion of electromagnetic force, is this: You will never touch anything, in the sense that the nuclei of your arm’s atoms will never knock against the nuclei of the table’s—for whatever that would be worth. What feels like “contact” is actually your body’s atoms exerting electromagnetic forces on the table’s atoms, and vice versa. In other words, what appears to be static contact is actually dynamic interaction, the exchange of forces.

  The very same forces, by the way, that your body’s atoms are exchanging with each other—the ones that make you whole.

  The Origin of Love

  Methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve their manners; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two …

  –ZEUS, QUOTED IN PLATO’S SYMPOSIUM

  You know we’re two hearts

  living in just one mind …

  –PHIL COLLINS

  Most folks familiar with Plato’s Symposium—or, alternately, John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch—know Aristophanes’ story for the origin of love. People began as eight-limbed creatures: four arms, four legs, two faces. In order to cut us down to size—literally—for our haughtiness at the gods or some such offense, Zeus splits us in two with lightning, and cinches the separated skin together at the belly button, and voilà: humans as we know them today, with just a pair of arms and pair of legs apiece. Out of an ancient need to return to that pre-lightning state of wholeness, we fall in love.6 All trying to get back to that original whole. The tangle of hugging, kissing, and sex being the closest we can come to “reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man.”7

  As a middle schooler barreling into early adolescence, I used to sit transfixed by late-night MTV screenings of the Spice Girls singing in various states of undress about when “2 Become 1.” When we talk about this notion in the context of love, we most frequently mean it as a euphemism for sex. I sometimes think about sex in such Aristophanic terms: a kind of triumphant, tragic attempt to combine two bodies, smooshing them together like clay. Triumphant because it’s as close as you ever get.

  Tragic for the same reason. Sex never quite seems, in the Aristophanic sense, to work—the two never quite manage to become one, and in fact sometimes end up creating a third in the process. Maybe the corporeal reunion, the undoing of Zeus’s separation, is simply impossible.8 When two people marry, there’s a legal sense in which they “become one”—if only for tax purposes. That, too, though, is hardly the kind of state-of-man repair that Aristophanes imagined.

  But there’s hope.

  Nervous System to Nervous System: Healed by Bandwidth

  The organizer of the 2008 Loebner Prize was University of Reading professor Kevin Warwick—also known in the press sometimes as “the world’s first cyborg.” In 1998 he had an RFID chip implanted in his arm: when he walks into his department, the doors open for him and a voice says, “Hello, Professor Warwick.” More recently, he’s undergone a second surgery, a much more invasive one: wiring a hundred-electrode array directly into the nerves of his arm.

  With this array he’s done a number of equally astonishing things: he’s been able to get a robot arm to mimic the actions of his real arm, using the electrode array to broadcast the neural signals coming from his brain to the robot arm, which follows those commands in real time, just as—of course—Warwick’s real arm does.9

  He also experimented with adding a sixth sense—namely, sonar. A sonar device attached to a baseball cap routed its signals into Warwick’s arm. At first, he says, he kept feeling as though his index finger was tingling whenever large objects got near him. But in very little time, the brain accustomed itself to the new data and the sensation of finger tingling went away. Close-by objects simply produced a kind of ineffable “oh, there’s an object close by” feeling. His brain had made sense of and integrated the data. He’d acquired a sixth sense.

  One of the landmark philosophy of mind papers of the twentieth century is Thomas Nagel’s 1974 “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Well, as far as sonar’s concerned, there’s one man alive who might actually be able to hazard an answer to Nagel’s famously unanswerable, and largely rhetorical, question.

  Perhaps the most amazing thing that Warwick did with his arm socket, though, is what he tried next. Warwick wasn’t the only one to get silicon grafted into his arm nerves. So did his wife.

  She would make a certain gesture with her arm, Warwick’s arm would twinge. Primitive? Maybe, yes. But Warwick waxes Wright brothers/Kitty Hawk about it. The Wrights were only off the ground for seconds at first; now we are used to traveling so far so fast that our bodies get out of sync with the sun.10

  A twinge is ineloquent: granted. But it represents the first direct nervous-system-to-nervous-system human communication. A signal that shortcuts language, shortcuts gesture.

  “It was the most exciting t
hing,” says Warwick, “I mean, when that signal arrived and I could understand the thing—and realizing what potentially that would mean in the future—Oh, it was the most exciting thing by far that I’ve been involved with.”11

  What might it mean in the future? What might the Lindbergh- or Earhart-comparable voyage be? As Douglas Hofstadter writes, “If the bandwidth were turned up more and more and more and still more … the sense of a clear boundary between them would slowly be dissolved.”

  Healed at last? By bandwidth, of all things? It’s not as crazy as it sounds. It’s what’s happening right now, in your own head.

  The Four-Hemisphere Brain

  Our uniquely human skills may well be produced by minute and circumscribed neuronal networks. And yet our highly modularized brain generates the feeling in all of us that we are integrated and unified. How so, given that we are a collection of specialized modules?

  –MICHAEL GAZZANIGA

  The only sex relations that have real value are those in which there is no reticence and in which the whole personality of both becomes merged in a new collective personality.

  –BERTRAND RUSSELL

  What Warwick and Hofstadter are talking about is not nearly so fantastical or sci-fi as it sounds. It’s a part of the brain’s very architecture, where the several hundred million fibers of the corpus callosum are ferrying information back and forth between our twin organs of thought, our left and right hemispheres, at an extremely high—but finite—rate. Set lovers aside for a moment: the integrity and coherence of the mind, the oneness of the self, is dependent on data transfer. On communication.