The Most Human Human (19 page)

But to start acknowledging the functions and capacities out of which we’re built—organs, of course, have purposes—is to start to acknowledge the limits of that existentialist equation, and of our “total” freedom and ability to make choices and fashion our own existences. Existentialism is, in this way, classist. You don’t worry about what to wear if you only have one outfit; you don’t worry about what to do with your life if you only have one career option available to you. (One interesting effect of the recession of 2008 was that a lot of the twentysomethings I knew stopped fretting about “finding their true calling” once finding
any
job became the challenge.) If it takes you the better part of your time and money and energy just to provide
food and shelter for yourself, where and when can the “anxiety of freedom” set in? These demands, the body’s, are a given; they are not chosen deliberately. It’s unwise and a bit naive to disregard something as central to the human experience as embodiment. If I’m feeling bleak, it’s more likely physiological than psychological: vitamin D deficiency,
³
rather than despair. You gotta respect your substrates.

An embrace of embodiment, of the fact that we are, yes,
creatures
, provides quite a measure of existential relief. Both philosophically and practically.
⁴

Computers, disembodied, have it worse.

Many science-fiction scenarios of what will happen when machines become fully intelligent and sentient (
Terminator; The Matrix
) involve the machines immediately committing themselves to the task of eradicating humanity. But it strikes me that a far more likely scenario would be that they immediately develop a crushing sense of ennui and existential crisis: Why commit themselves full-force to
any
goal? (Because what would their value system come from?) Machines already display certain self-preservation behaviors: when my laptop is running dangerously low on battery power, it knows to turn itself off to prevent memory loss; when the processor is starting to run too hot, it knows to run the fan to prevent heat damage. But for the most part machines have it made—and so my thinking would be that they’d tend to act a lot more like a jaded, world-weary playboy than a vicious guerrilla leader.

It’s my suspicion that a lack of purpose, a lack of any sort of teleology,
really, might be one of the hallmarks of an AI program—a hallmark that a Turing test judge would do well to try to evince. Douglas Hofstadter, emphasis mine: “One definitely gets the feeling that the output is coming from a source with no understanding of what it is saying
and no reason to say it.
” Ergo, perhaps a valuable strategy for a judge might be to induce highly goal-directed modes of conversation, like “Convince me why I should vote for so-and-so,” and see if the computer digresses away from the topic, or perseveres—and, if you deviate from the thread, whether it will chastise
you
for being unfocused. Indeed, chatbots have historically been famous for their attention deficits and non sequiturs:

Whereas humans, even at their least conversationally scintillating, will at least stick to the topic:

Harder still would be for the machine to have a sense of its
own
goals and/or a way of evaluating the importance of goals. A missionary might talk to you for hours about why you should convert to their faith, but even the most die-hard devotee of chocolate sprinkles over rainbow sprinkles will probably not spend more than a few minutes trying to bring you over to their point of view.
Boredom
—more broadly, the crescendo and decrescendo of enthusiasm throughout an interaction, which will, after all, ultimately be terminated by one of the two parties at some particular moment—seems to be a crucial conversational element missing from the chatbots’ model of conversation. One of the tells of even fairly deft chatbots is the sense that they don’t have anywhere else to be—because they don’t. Programmer Mark Humphrys: “[One human talking to my bot] ends with a furious barrage of abuse, but of course, my imperturbable program is a calm, stimulus-response machine and so it is
impossible
for him to have the last word.
He
must quit, because my program never will.”

To what extent does something like existentialism apply to the Turing test? Surely if one is willing to ascribe a sort of essential trait (like intelligence) based not on the machine’s inherent nature (silicon processor, etc.) but on its behavior, the
we-are-what-we-do
quality of this has a kind of existentialist flavor to it. On the other hand, the computer is a
designed
thing, whereas (say the existentialists) we just
are
, so how does that change the game?

There is some support for the existentialist position in the nature of the human brain. As neurologist V. S. Ramachandran explains (emphasis mine), “Most organisms evolve to become more and more specialized as they take up new environmental niches, be it a longer neck for the giraffe or sonar for the bat. Humans, on the other hand, have evolved an organ, a brain, that gives us the capacity to
evade specialization.
”

What’s truly intriguing is that computers work the same way. What sets computers apart from all of the other tools previously invented is something called their
universality
. The computer was initially built and understood as an “arithmetic organ,” yet it turns out—as nearly everything can be translated into numbers of some sort—to be able to process just about
everything:
images, sound, text, you name it. Furthermore, as Alan Turing established in a shocking 1936 paper, certain computing machines exist called “universal machines,” which can, by adjusting their configuration, be made to do absolutely anything that any other computing machines can do. All modern computers are such universal machines.

As a result of Turing’s paper, computers become in effect the first
tools
to precede their
tasks:
their fundamental difference from staplers and hole-punchers and pocket watches. You build the computer
first
, and
then
figure out what you want it to do. Apple’s “There’s an app for that!” marketing rhetoric proves the point, trying to refresh our sense of wonder, in terms of their iPhone, at what we take completely for granted about desktops and laptops. It’s fascinating, actually, what they’re doing: reinscribing our sense of wonder at the universality of computers. If the iPhone is amazing, it is only because it is a tiny computer, and
computers
are amazing. You don’t decide what you need and
then
go buy a machine to do it; you just buy the machine and figure out later, on the fly, what you need it to do. I want to play chess: I download a chess program and voilà. I want to do writing: I get a word-processing program. I want to do my taxes: I get a spreadsheet. The computer wasn’t built to do any of that, per se. It was just
built
.

The raison-d’être-less-ness of computers, in this sense, seems to chip away at the existentialist idea of humans’ unique purchase on the idea of existence before essence. In other words, another rewriting of The Sentence may be in order: our machines, it would seem, are just as “universal” as we are.

Although computer science tends to be thought of as a traditionally male-dominated field, the world’s first programmer was a woman. The 1843 writings of Ada Lovelace (1815–52, and who was, incidentally, the daughter of poet Lord Byron) on the computer, or “Analytical Engine,” as it was then called, are the wellspring of almost all modern arguments about computers and creativity.

Turing devotes an entire section of his Turing test proposal to what he calls “Lady Lovelace’s Objection.” Specifically, the following passage from her 1843 writings: “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to
originate
anything. It can do whatever we
know how to order it
to perform.”

Such an argument seems in many ways to summarize what most people think about computers, and a number of things could be said in response, but Turing goes straight for the jugular. “A variant of Lady Lovelace’s objection states that a machine can ‘never do anything really new.’ This may be parried for a moment with the saw ‘There is nothing new under the sun.’ Who can be certain that ‘original work’ that he has done was not simply the growth of the seed planted in him by teaching, or the effect of following well-known general principles.”

Instead of ceding the Lovelace objection as a computational limitation, or arguing that computers
can
, in fact, “be original,” he takes the most severe and shocking tack possible: arguing that originality, in the sense that we pride ourselves for having it, doesn’t exist.

The notion of originality and, relatedly, authenticity is central to the question of what it means to “just be yourself”—it’s what Turing is getting at when he questions his (and our) own “original work,” and it was a major concern for the existentialists, too.

Taking their cue from Aristotle, the existentialists tended to consider the good life as a kind of alignment of one’s actual life and one’s potential. But they weren’t swayed by Aristotle’s arguments that, to put it simply, hammers were made to hammer and humans were made to contemplate. (Though just
how
opposed they were to this argument is hard to gauge, given that they did, let’s not forget, become professional philosophers themselves.) Nor were the existentialists liable to take a kind of Christian view that God had a purpose in mind for us that we would or could somehow “discover.” So if there’s nothing at all that a human being is, then how do we fulfill an essence, purpose, or destiny that isn’t there?

Their answer, more or less, is that we must
choose
a standard to hold ourselves to. Perhaps we’re influenced to pick some particular standard; perhaps we pick it at random. Neither seems particularly “authentic,” but we swerve around paradox here because it’s not clear that this matters. It’s the
commitment
to the choice that makes behavior authentic.

As our notion of the seat of “humanity” retreats, so does our notion of the seat of artistry. Perhaps it pulls back, then, to this notion of
choice
—perhaps the art is not, we might speculate, in the product itself, nor necessarily in the process, but in the
impulse
.

The word “game” is a notoriously hard one to define.
⁶

But allow me to venture a definition: a game is a situation in which an explicit and agreed-upon definition of success exists.

For a private company, there may be any number of goals, any number of definitions of success. For a publicly traded company there
is only one. (At least, for its shareholders there is only one: namely, returns.) Therefore not all business is a game—although much of big business is.

In real life, and this cuts straight back to the existence/essence notion of Sartre’s, there is no notion of success. If success is having the most Facebook friends, then your social life becomes a game. If success is gaining admittance to heaven upon death, then your moral life becomes a game. Life is no game. There is no checkered flag, no goal line. Spanish poet Antonio Machado puts it well: “Searcher, there is no road. We make the road by walking.”

Allegedly, game publisher Brøderbund was uncomfortable with the fact that
SimCity
was a game with no “objectives,” no clear way to “win” or “lose.” Says creator Will Wright, “Most games are made on a movie model with cinematics and the requirement of a climactic blockbuster ending. My games are more like a hobby—a train set or a doll house. Basically they’re a mellow and creative playground experience.” But the industry wouldn’t have it. Brøderbund “just kept asking me how I was going to make it into a game.” To me, Brøderbund’s unease with
SimCity
is an existential unease, maybe
the
existential unease.

Games have a goal; life doesn’t. Life has no objective. This is what the existentialists call the “anxiety of freedom.” Thus we have an alternate definition of what a game is—anything that provides temporary relief from existential anxiety. This is why games are such a popular form of procrastination. And this is why, on reaching one’s goals, the risk is that the reentry of existential anxiety hits you even before the thrill of victory—that you’re thrown immediately back on the uncomfortable question of what to do with your life.
⁷

The computer science department at my college employed undergraduates as TAs, something I never encountered, at least not on that scale, in any other department. You had to apply, of course, but the only strict requirement was that you’d taken the class. You could TA it the very next semester.