The Most Human Human

by Brian Christian

  8 Paul Ekman, Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (New York: Norton, 2001).

  9 Leil Lowndes, How to Talk to Anyone (London: Thorsons, 1999).

  10 Neil Strauss, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (New York: ReganBooks, 2005).

  11 Larry King, How to Talk to Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere (New York: Crown, 1994).

  12 Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (New York: Pocket, 1998).

  13 David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).

  14 Melissa Prober, personal interview. 188 Mike Martinez, personal interview.

  15 David Sheff, personal interview.

  16 Ekman, Telling Lies.

  17 Will Pavia tells his story of being fooled in the 2008 Loebner Prize competition in “Machine Takes on Man at Mass Turing Test,” Times (London), October 13, 2008.

  18 Dave Ackley, personal interview.

  9. Not Staying Intact

  1 Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (New York: Liveright, 1930).

  2 Racter, The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed (New York: Warner Books, 1984).

  3 David Levy, Roberta Catizone, Bobby Batacharia, Alex Krotov, and Yorick Wilks, “CONVERSE: A Conversational Companion,” Proceedings of the First International Workshop of Human-Computer Conversation (Bellagio, Italy, 1997).

  4 Yorick Wilks, “On Whose Shoulders?” (Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award speech, 2008).

  5 Thomas Whalen, “Thom’s Participation in the Loebner Competition 1995; or, How I Lost the Contest and Re-evaluated Humanity,” thomwhalen.com-ThomLoebner1995.html.

  6 The PARRY and ELIZA transcript comes from their encounter on September 18, 1972.

  7 Michael Gazzaniga, Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique (New York: Ecco, 2008).

  8 Mystery, The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women into Bed, with Chris Odom (New York: St. Martin’s, 2007).

  9 Ross Jeffries, in “Hypnotists,” Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends, BBC Two, September 25, 2000.

  10 Richard Bandler and John Grinder, Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming (Moab, Utah: Real People Press, 1979).

  11 Will Dana, in Lawrence Grobel, The Art of the Interview: Lessons from a Master of the Craft (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004).

  12 David Sheff, personal interview.

  13 Racter, Policeman’s Beard.

  14 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001).

  15 My money—and that of many others: See also the famous 1993 accusation by early blogger (in fact, inventor of the term “weblog”) Jorn Barger: “ ‘The Policeman’s Beard’ Was Largely Prefab!” www.robotwisdom.com/ai/racterfaq.html.

  16 a YouTube video: This particular video is a bot Cassandra, in development by ejTalk Corporation. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Otgt2TurCnI

  17 Salvador Dalí, “Preface: Chess, It’s Me,” translated by Albert Field, in Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo, 1987).

  18 Richard S. Wallace, “The Anatomy of A.L.I.C.E.,” in Parsing the Turing Test, edited by Robert Epstein et al. (New York: Springer, 2008).

  19 Hava Siegelmann, personal interview.

  20 George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” Horizon 13, no. 76 (April 1946), pp. 252–65.

  21 Roger Levy, personal interview.

  22 Dave Ackley, personal interview.

  23 Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner, see below) notes that “the Greater Dallas Council on Alcohol and Drug Abuse has compiled an extraordinarily entertaining index of cocaine street names.”

  24 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

  25 Ezra Pound’s famous battle cry of modernism, “Make it new,” comes from his translation of the Confucian text The Great Digest, a.k.a. The Great Learning.

  26 Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007).

  27 Sun Tzu, The Art of War, translated by John Minford (New York: Penguin, 2003).

  28 The phrase “euphemism treadmill” comes from Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate (New York: Viking, 2002). See also W. V. Quine, “Euphemism,” in Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1987).

  29 The controversy over Rahm Emanuel’s remark appears to have originated with Peter Wallsten, “Chief of Staff Draws Fire from Left as Obama Falters,” Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2010.

  30 Rosa’s Law, S.2781, 2010.

  31 “Mr. Burton’s staff”: Don Van Natta Jr., “Panel Chief Refuses Apology to Clinton,” New York Times, April 23, 1998.

  32 Will Shortz, quoted in Jesse Sheidlower, “The Dirty Word in 43 Down,” Slate Magazine, April 6, 2006.

  33 Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (New York: William Morrow, 2005).

  34 Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005).

  35 Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976).

  36 The effect that photons have on the electrons they are measuring is called the Compton effect; the paper where Heisenberg uses this to lay the foundation for his famous “uncertainty principle” is “Über den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik,” Zeitschrift für Physik 43 (1927), pp. 172–98, available in English in Quantum Theory and Measurement, edited by John Archibald Wheeler and Wojciech Hubert Zurek (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983). 210 Deborah Tannen’s That’s Not What I Meant! How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships (New York: Ballantine, 1987) has illuminating sample dialogues of how trying to ask a question “neutrally” can go horribly wrong.

  37 A famous study on wording and memory, and the one from which the car crash language is taken, is from Elizabeth F. Loftus and John C. Palmer, “Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction: An Example of the Interaction Between Language and Memory,” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13, no. 5 (October 1974), pp. 585–89.

  38 For more on the “or not” wording, see, e.g., Jon Krosnick, Eric Shaeffer, Gary Langer, and Daniel Merkle, “A Comparison of Minimally Balanced and Fully Balanced Forced Choice Items” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, Nashville, August 16, 2003).

  39 For more on how asking about one dimension of life can (temporarily) alter someone’s perception of the rest of their life, see Fritz Strack, Leonard Martin, and Norbert Schwarz, “Priming and Communication: Social Determinants of Information Use in Judgments of Life Satisfaction,” European Journal of Social Psychology 18, no. 5 (1988), pp. 429–42. Broadly, this is referred to as a type of “focusing illusion.”

  40 Robert Creeley and Archie Rand, Drawn & Quartered (New York: Granary Books, 2001).

  41 Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), Philadelphia Museum of Art.

  42 Hava Siegelmann, Neural Networks and Analog Computation: Beyond the Turing Limit (Boston: Birkhäuser, 1999).

  43 Ackley, personal interview.

  44 Plato, Symposium, translated by Benjamin Jowett, in The Dialogues of Plato, Volume One (New York: Oxford University Press, 1892).

  45 Phil Collins, “Two Hearts,” from Buster: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack.

  46 John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, directed by John Cameron Mitchell (Killer Films, 2001).

  47 Spice Girls, “2 Become 1,” Spice (Virgin, 1996).

  48 Milk, directed by Gus Van Sant (Focus Features), 2008.

  49 Kevin Warwick, personal interview.

  50 Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (October 1974), pp. 435–50.

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p; 51 Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop (New York: Basic Books, 2007).

  52 Gazzaniga, Human.

  53 Russell, Conquest of Happiness.

  54 Roberto Caminiti, Hassan Ghaziri, Ralf Galuske, Patrick Hof, and Giorgio Innocenti, “Evolution Amplified Processing with Temporally Dispersed Slow Neuronal Connectivity in Primates,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 46 (November 17, 2009), pp. 19551–56.

  55 The Bach cantata is 197, “Gott ist unsre Zuversicht.” For more, see Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop.

  56 Benjamin Seider, Gilad Hirschberger, Kristin Nelson, and Robert Levenson, “We Can Work It Out: Age Differences in Relational Pronouns, Physiology, and Behavior in Marital Conflict,” Psychology and Aging 24, no. 3 (September 2009), pp. 604–13.

  10. High Surprisal

  1 Claude Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1948), pp. 379–423, 623–56.

  2 average American teenager: Katie Hafner, “Texting May Be Taking a Toll,” New York Times, May 25, 2009.

  3 The two are in fact related: For more information on the connections between Shannon (information) entropy and thermodynamic entropy, see, e.g., Edwin Jaynes, “Information Theory and Statistical Mechanics,” Physical Review 106, no. 4, (May 1957), pp. 620–30; and Edwin Jaynes, “Information Theory and Statistical Mechanics II,” Physical Review 108, no. 2 (October 1957), pp. 171–90.

  4 Donald Barthelme, “Not-Knowing,” in Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme, edited by Kim Herzinger (New York: Random House, 1997).

  5 Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

  6 The cloze test comes originally from W. Taylor, “Cloze procedure: A New Tool for Measuring Readability,” Journalism Quarterly 30 (1953), pp. 415–33.

  7 Mystery, The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women into Bed, with Chris Odom (New York: St. Martin’s, 2007).

  8 Scott McDonald and Richard Shillcock, “Eye Movements Reveal the On-Line Computation of Lexical Probabilities During Reading,” Psychological Science 14, no. 6, (November 2003), pp. 648–52.

  9 Keith Rayner, Katherine Binder, Jane Ashby, and Alexander Pollatsek, “Eye Movement Control in Reading: Word Predictability Has Little Influence on Initial Landing Positions in Words” (emphasis mine, as they reference its effects on words). Vision Research 41, no. 7 (March 2001), pp. 943–54. For more on entropy’s effect on reading, see Keith Rayner, “Eye Movements in Reading and Information Processing: 20 Years of Research,” Psychological Bulletin 124, No. 3, (November 1998), pp. 372–422; Steven Frisson, Keith Rayner, and Martin J. Pickering, “Effects of Contextual Predictability and Transitional Probability on Eye Movements During Reading,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 31, No. 5 (September 2005), pp. 862–77; Reinhold Kliegl, Ellen Grabner, Martin Rolfs, and Ralf Engbert, “Length, Frequency, and Predictability Effects of Words on Eye Movements in Reading,” European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 16, nos. 1–2 (January–March 2004), pp. 262–84.

  10 Laurent Itti and Pierre Baldi, “Bayesian Surprise Attracts Human Attention,” Vision Research 49, no. 10 (May 2009), pp. 1295–306. See also, Pierre Baldi and Laurent Itti, “Of Bits and Wows: A Bayesian Theory of Surprise with Applications to Attention,” Neural Networks 23, no. 5 (June 2010), pp. 649–66; Linda Geddes, “Model of Surprise Has ‘Wow’ Factor Built In,” New Scientist, January 2009; Emma Byrne, “Surprise Moves Eyes,” Primary Visual Cortex, October 2008; T. Nathan Mundhenk, Wolfgang Einhäuser, and Laurent Itti, “Automatic Computation of an Image’s Statistical Surprise Predicts Performance of Human Observers on a Natural Image Detection Task,” Vision Research 49, no. 13 (June 2009), pp. 1620–37.

  11 al Qaeda videos: In Kim Zetter, “Researcher’s Analysis of al Qaeda Images Reveals Surprises,” Wired, August 2, 2007. 233 fashion industry: Neal Krawetz, “Body by Victoria,” Secure Computing blog, www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/322-Body-By-Victoria.html.

  12 T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Poetry, June 1915.

  13 Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917).

  14 C.D. Wright, “Tours,” in Steal Away (Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 2002).

  15 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).

  16 David Shields, quoted in Bond Huberman, “I Could Go On Like This Forever,” City Arts, July 1, 2008.

  17 Roger Ebert, review of Quantum of Solace, November 12, 2008, at rogerebert.suntimes.com.

  18 Matt Mahoney, “Text Compression as a Test for Artificial Intelligence,” Proceedings of the Sixteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the Eleventh Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (Menlo Park, Calif.: American Association for Artificial Intelligence, 1999). See also Matt Mahoney, Data Compression Explained (San Jose, Calif.: Ocarina Networks, 2010), www.mattmahoney.net/dc/dce.html.

  19 Annie Dillard, An American Childhood (New York: Harper & Row, 1987).

  20 Eric Hayot, in “Somewhere Out There,” episode 374 of This American Life, February 13, 2009.

  21 Three Colors: White, directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski (Miramax, 1994).

  22 David Bellos, “I, Translator,” New York Times, March 20, 2010.

  23 Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979).

  24 “Six Years Later: The Children of September 11,” The Oprah Winfrey Show, September 11, 2007.

  25 George Bonanno, “Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience: Have We Underestimated the Human Capacity to Thrive After Extremely Adverse Events?” American Psychologist 59, no. 1 (January 2004), pp. 20–28. See also George Bonanno, The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss (New York: Basic Books, 2009).

  26 Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York: Morrow, 1974).

  27 It’s widely held: See, e.g., papers by the University of Edinburgh’s Sharon Goldwater, Brown University’s Mark Johnson, UC Berkeley’s Thomas Griffiths, the University of Wisconsin’s Jenny Saffran, the Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute’s Dan Mirman, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Daniel Swingley, among others.

  28 Eugene Charniak, personal interview.

  29 Shannon, “Mathematical Theory of Communication.”

  30 The American Heritage Book of English Usage: A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996).

  31 “attorney general”: These three examples taken from Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way (New York: Morrow, 1990).

  32 Dave Matthews Band, “You and Me,” Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King (RCA, 2009).

  33 Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth (New York: Epstein & Carroll, 1961).

  34 Guy Blelloch, “Introduction to Data Compression,” manuscript, 2001.

  35 David Foster Wallace, “Authority and American Usage,” in Consider the Lobster (New York: Little, Brown, 2005).

  36 Takeshi Murata, “Monster Movie” (2005).

  37 Kanye West, “Welcome to Heartbreak,” directed by Nabil Elderkin (2009).

  38 Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being.

  39 Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach.

  40 Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being.

  41 Timothy Ferriss, interview with Leon Ho, Stepcase Lifehack, June 1, 2007.

  42 Heather McHugh, “In Ten Senses: Some Sentences About Art’s Senses and Intents” (lecture, University of Washington, Solomon Katz Distinguished Lectures in the Humanities, December 4, 2003).

  43 Forrest Gander, As a Friend (New York: New Directions, 2008).

  44 Claude Shannon, “Prediction and Entropy of Printed English,” Bell System Technical Journal 30, no. 1 (1951), pp. 50–64.

  45 Shannon, “Mathematical Theory of Communication.”

  11. Conclusion: The Most Human Human
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br />   1 David Levy, Love and Sex with Robots (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).

  2 Robert Epstein, “My Date with a Robot,” Scientific American Mind, June/July 2006.

  3 Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007).

  4 Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005).

  5 bacteria rule the earth: See Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York: Harmony Books 1996).

  Epilogue: The Unsung Beauty of the Glassware Cabinet

  1 The idea of the Cornell box dates back to Cindy M. Goral, Kenneth E. Torrance, Donald P. Greenberg, and Bennett Battaile, “Modeling the Interaction of Light Between Diffuse Surfaces,” Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH Proceedings) 18, no. 3 (July 1984), pp. 213–22.

  2 Devon Penney, personal interview.

  3 Eduardo Hurtado, “Instrucciones para pintar el cielo” (“How to Paint the Sky”), translated by Mónica de la Torre, in Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico, edited by Luis Cortés Bargalló and Forrest Gander (Louisville, Ky.: Sarabande Books, 2006).

  4 Bertrand Russell, “In Praise of Idleness,” in In Praise of Idleness, and Other Essays (New York: Norton, 1935).