The Most Human Human (38 page)

12
David Alan Grier,
When Computers Were Human
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).

13
Daniel Gilbert,
Stumbling on Happiness
(New York: Knopf, 2006).

14
Michael Gazzaniga,
Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique
(New York: Ecco, 2008).

15
Julian K. Finn, Tom Tregenza, and Mark D. Norman, “Defensive Tool Use in a Coconut-Carrying Octopus,”
Current Biology
19, no. 23 (December 15, 2009), pp. 1069–70.

16
Douglas R. Hofstadter,
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
(New York: Basic Books, 1979).

17
Noam Chomsky, email correspondence (emphasis mine).

18
John Lucas, “Commentary on Turing’s ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence,’ ” in Epstein et al.,
Parsing the Turing Test
.

1
Alix Spiegel, “ ‘Voice Blind’ Man Befuddled by Mysterious Callers,”
Morning Edition
, National Public Radio, July 12, 2010.

2
David Kernell, posting (under the handle “rubico”) to the message board
www.4chan.org
, September 17, 2008.

3
Donald Barthelme, “Not-Knowing,” in
Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme
, edited by Kim Herzinger (New York: Random House, 1997). Regarding “Bless Babel”: Programmers have a concept called “security through diversity,” which is basically the idea that a world with a number of different operating systems, spreadsheet programs, etc., is more secure than one with a software “monoculture.” The idea is that the effectiveness of a particular hacking technique is limited to the machines that “speak that language,” the way that genetic diversity generally means that no single disease will wipe out an entire species. Modern operating systems are designed to be “idiosyncratic” about how certain critical sections of memory are allocated, so that each computer, even if it is running the same basic environment, will be a little bit different. For more, see, e.g., Elena Gabriela Barrantes, David H. Ackley, Stephanie Forrest, Trek S. Palmer, Darko Stefanovic, and Dino Dai Zovi, “Intrusion Detection: Randomized Instruction Set Emulation to Disrupt Binary Code Injection Attacks,”
Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security
(New York: ACM, 2003), pp. 281–89.

4
“Speed Dating with Yaacov and Sue Deyo,” interview by Terry Gross,
Fresh Air
, National Public Radio, August 17, 2005. See also Yaacov
Deyo and Sue Deyo,
Speed Dating: The Smarter, Faster Way to Lasting Love
(New York: HarperResource, 2002).

5
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” season 3, episode 12 of
Sex and the City
, August 27, 2000.

6
For more on how the form/content problem in dating intersects with computers, see the excellent video by the Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely, “Why Online Dating Is So Unsatisfying,” Big Think, July 7, 2010,
bigthink.com/ideas/20749
.

7
The 1991 Loebner Prize transcripts, unlike most other years, are unavailable through the Loebner Prize website. The Clay transcripts come by way of Mark Halpern, “The Trouble with the Turing Test,”
New Atlantis
(Winter 2006). The Weintraub transcripts, and judge’s reaction, come by way of P. J. Skerrett, “Whimsical Software Wins a Prize for Humanness,”
Popular Science
, May 1992.

8
Rollo Carpenter, personal interview.

9
Rollo Carpenter, in “PopSci’s Future of Communication: Cleverbot,” Science Channel, October 6, 2009.

10
Bernard Reginster (lecture, Brown University, October 15, 2003).

11
“giving style to one’s character”: Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Gay Science
, translated by Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1974), sec. 290.

12
Jaron Lanier,
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
(New York: Knopf, 2010).

13
Eugene Demchenko and Vladimir Veselov, “Who Fools Whom?” in
Parsing the Turing Test
, edited by Robert Epstein et al. (New York: Springer, 2008).

14
Say Anything …
, directed and written by Cameron Crowe (20th Century Fox, 1989).

15
Robert Lockhart, “Integrating Semantics and Empirical Language Data” (lecture at the Chatbots 3.0 conference, Philadelphia, March 27, 2010).

16
For more on Google Translate, the United Nations, and literature, see, e.g., David Bellos, “I, Translator,”
New York Times
, March 20, 2010; and Miguel Helft, “Google’s Computing Power Refines Translation Tool,”
New York Times
, March 8, 2010.

17
The Office
, directed and written by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, BBC Two, 2001–3.

18
Hilary Stout, “The End of the Best Friend,” also titled “A Best Friend? You Must Be Kidding,”
New York Times
, June 16, 2010.

19
50 First Dates
, directed by Peter Segal (Columbia Pictures, 2004).

20
Jennifer E. Whiting, “Impersonal Friends,”
Monist
74 (1991), pp. 3–29. See also Jennifer E. Whiting, “Friends and Future Selves,”
Philosophical Review
95 (1986), pp. 547–80; and Bennett Helm, “Friendship,” in
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
, edited by Edward N. Zalta (Fall 2009 ed.).

21
Richard S. Wallace, “The Anatomy of A.L.I.C.E.,” in Epstein et al.,
Parsing the Turing Test
.

22
For more on MGonz, see Mark Humphrys, “How My Program Passed the Turing Test,” in Epstein et al.,
Parsing the Turing Test
.

1
Hiromi Kobayashi and Shiro Kohshima, “Unique Morphology of the Human Eye,”
Nature
387, no. 6635, June 19, 1997, pp. 767–68.

2
Michael Tomasello et al., “Reliance on Head Versus Eyes in the Gaze Following of Great Apes and Human Infants: The Cooperative Eye Hypothesis,”
Journal of Human Evolution
52, no. 3 (March 2007), pp. 314–20.

3
Gert-Jan Lokhorst, “Descartes and the Pineal Gland,” in
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
, edited by Edward N. Zalta (Spring 2009 ed.).

4
Carl Zimmer,
Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain—and How It Changed the World
(New York: Free Press, 2004).

5
Karšu
and the other terms: Leo G. Perdue,
The Sword and the Stylus: An Introduction to Wisdom in the Age of Empires
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 2008). See also Dale Launderville,
Spirit and Reason: The Embodied Character of Ezekiel’s Symbolic Thinking
(Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2007).

6
“black wires grow on her head”: The Shakespeare poem is the famous Sonnet 130, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun …”

7
Hendrik Lorenz, “Ancient Theories of Soul,” in
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
, edited by Edward N. Zalta (Summer 2009 ed.).

8
“A piece of your brain”: V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee,
Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
(New York: William Morrow, 1998).

9
All Dogs Go to Heaven
, directed by Don Bluth (Goldcrest, 1989).

10
Chocolat
, directed by Lasse Hallström (Miramax, 2000).

11
Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Volume 4: The Will to Power, Book One and Two
, translated by Oscar Levy (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1924), sec. 75.

12
Aristotle,
The Nicomachean Ethics
, translated by J. A. K. Thomson and Hugh Tredennick (London: Penguin, 2004), 1178b5–25.

13
Claude Shannon, “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits” (master’s thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1940).

14
President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research,
Defining Death: Medical, Legal, and Critical Issues in the Determination of Death
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1981).

15
Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death, “A Definition of Irreversible Coma,”
Journal of the American Medical Association
205, no. 6 (August 1968), pp. 337–40.

16
The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, Uniform Determination of Death Act (1981).

17
Michael Gazzaniga, “The Split Brain Revisited,”
Scientific American
(2002). See also the numerous videos available on YouTube of Gazzaniga’s interviews and research: “Early Split Brain Research: Michael Gazzaniga Interview,”
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lmfxQ
-HK7Y; “Split Brain Behavioral Experiments,”
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMLzP1VCANo
; “Split-Brain Patients,”
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZnyQewsB_Y
.

18
“You guys are just so
funny”:
Ramachandran and Blakeslee,
Phantoms in the Brain
, citing Itzhak Fried, Charles L. Wilson, Katherine A. MacDonald, and Eric J. Behnke, “Electric Current Stimulates Laughter,”
Nature
391 (February 1998), p. 650.

19
a woman gave her number to male hikers: Donald G. Dutton and Arthur P. Aron, “Some Evidence for Heightened Sexual Attraction Under Conditions of High Anxiety,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
30 (1974).

20
Oliver Sacks,
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
(New York: Summit Books, 1985).

21
Ramachandran and Blakeslee,
Phantoms in the Brain
.

22
Ken Robinson, “Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity,”
TED.com
.

23
Ken Robinson, “Transform Education? Yes, We Must,” Huffington Post, January 11, 2009.

24
Baba Shiv, “The Frinky Science of the Human Mind” (lecture, 2009).

25
Dan Ariely,
Predictably Irrational
(New York: Harper, 2008).

26
Dan Ariely,
The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
(New York: Harper, 2010).

27
Daniel Kahneman, “A Short Course in Thinking About Thinking” (lecture series), Edge Master Class 07, Auberge du Soleil, Rutherford, Calif., July 20–22, 2007,
www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kahneman07/kahneman07_index.html
.

28
Antoine Bechara, “Choice,”
Radiolab
, November 14, 2008.

29
Blade Runner
, directed by Ridley Scott (Warner Bros., 1982).

30
Philip K. Dick,
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968).

31
William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” in
The Tower
(New York: Macmillan, 1928).

32
Dave Ackley, personal interview.

33
Ray Kurzweil,
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
(New York: Viking, 2005).

34
Hava Siegelmann, personal interview.

35
See Jessica Riskin, “The Defecating Duck; or, The Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life,”
Critical Inquiry
20, no. 4 (Summer 2003), pp. 599–633.

36
Roger Levy, personal interview.

37
Jim Giles, “Google Tops Translation Ranking,”
Nature News
, November 7, 2006. See also Bill Softky, “How Google Translates Without Understanding,”
The Register
, May 15, 2007; and the official NIST results from 2006 at
http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/
mig/tests/mt/2006/doc/mt06eval_official_results.html
. It’s worth noting that particularly in languages like German with major syntactical discrepancies from English, where a word in a sentence of the source language can appear in a very distant place in the sentence of the target language, a purely
statistical approach is not quite as successful, and some hard-coding (or inference) of actual syntactical
rules
(e.g., “sentences generally have a ‘subject’ portion and a ‘predicate’ portion”) will indeed help the translation software.

38
Randall C. Kennedy, “Fat, Fatter, Fattest: Microsoft’s Kings of Bloat,”
InfoWorld
, April 14, 2008.

39
W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne,
Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant
(Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2005).

40
awe: It appears that articles that inspire awe are the most likely to be emailed or become “viral,” counter to popular thinking that fear, sex, and/or irony prevail online. See John Tierney, “People Share News Online That Inspires Awe, Researchers Find,”
New York Times
, February 8, 2010, which cites the University of Pennsylvania’s Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman’s study, “Social Transmission and Viral Culture.”

1
Joseph Weizenbaum,
Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation
(San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976).

2
Joseph Weizenbaum, “ELIZA—a Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine,”
Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery
9, no. 1 (January 1966), pp. 36–45.

3
To be precise, ELIZA was a software framework or paradigm developed by Weizenbaum, who actually wrote a number of different “scripts” for that framework. The most famous of these by far is the Rogerian therapist persona, which was called DOCTOR. However, “ELIZA running the DOCTOR script” is generally what people mean when they refer to “ELIZA,” and for brevity and ease of understanding I’ve followed the convention (used by Weizenbaum himself) of simply saying “ELIZA.”