(5) 1. Introduction: The Most Human Human

Over de Turing-test-competitie van de AI-gemeenschap.

"The test is named for British mathematician Alan Turing, one of the founders of computer science, who in 1950 attempted to answer one of the field’s earliest questions: Can machines think? That is, would it ever be possible to construct a computer so sophisticated that it could actually be said to be thinking, to be intelligent, to have a mind? And if indeed there were, someday, such a machine: How would we know?" [mijn nadruk] (6)

[Alleen al de vaagheid van dat soort termen ... ]

"The program that receives the highest share of votes and confidence from the judges each year (regardless of whether it “passes the Turing test” by fooling 30 percent of them) is awarded the “Most Human Computer” title.(...) But there is also, intriguingly, another title, one given to the confederate who elicited the greatest number of votes and greatest confidence from the judges: the “Most Human Human” award."(8)

Christian wilde voor 2009 graag als ' confederate' meedoen en meldde zich bij de organisator.

"He asked me about myself, and I explained that I’m a nonfiction writer of science and philosophy, specifically of the ways in which science and philosophy intersect with daily life, and that I’m fascinated by the idea of the Turing test and of the “Most Human Human.”"(10)

"More than this, though, the test raises a number of questions, exciting as well as troubling, at the intersection of computer science, cognitive science, philosophy, and daily life. As someone who has studied and written about each of these areas, and who has published peer-reviewed cognitive science research, I find the Turing test particularly compelling for the way it manages to draw from and connect them all."(11)

"Here’s the thing: beyond its use as a technological benchmark, beyond even the philosophical, biological, and moral questions it poses, the Turing test is, at bottom, about the act of communication. I see its deepest questions as practical ones: How do we connect meaningfully with each other, as meaningfully as possible, within the limits of language and time? How does empathy work? What is the process by which someone comes into our life and comes to mean something to us? These, to me, are the test’s most central questions—the most central questions of being human." [mijn nadruk] (22)

[Maar als dat zo is, is het een enorme beperking dat de twee gesprekspartners in de Turing-test door de beoordelaar niet gezien worden. Dan wordt communicatie puur talig en is er geen sprake van non-verbale uitingen. In feite sluit je de lichamelijke kant van communicaite dan uit.]

"There are a number of books written about the technical side of the Turing test: for instance, how to cleverly design Turing test programs—called chatterbots, chatbots, or just bots. In fact, almost everything written at a practical level about the Turing test is about how to make good bots, with a small remaining fraction about how to be a good judge. But nowhere do you read how to be a good confederate. I find this odd, since the confederate side, it seems to me, is where the stakes are highest, and where the answers ramify the furthest."(23)

[Dat is dus zo typisch. De aandacht gaat naar de machine, niet naar de mens.]

"In a sense, this is a book about artificial intelligence, the story of its history and of my own personal involvement, in my own small way, in that history. But at the core, it’s a book about living life."(23)

(26) 2. Authenticating

"In the world of machines, we authenticate on content: password, PIN, last four digits of your Social Security number, your mother’s maiden name. But in the human world, we authenticate on form: face, vocal timbre, handwriting, signature. And, crucially, verbal style." [mijn nadruk] (27)

"Having a sense of a person — their disposition, character, “way of being in the world” — and knowing about them — where they grew up, how many siblings they have, what they majored in, where they work — are two rather different things. Just like security, so does intimacy have both form and content."(29)

Volgen allerlei voorbeelden van gesprekken met chatbots en zo.

"Cleverbot, for instance, can know that “Scaramouche, Scaramouche” is best answered by “Will you do the fandango?” without needing any links to Queen or “Bohemian Rhapsody” in between, let alone needing to know that Scaramouche is a stock character in seventeenth-century Italian farce theater and that the fandango is an Andalusian folk dance. It’s simply observed people saying one, then the other. Using huge bodies of text (“corpora”) from certified United Nations translators, Google Translate and its statistical cousins regurgitate previous human translations the way Cleverbot and its cousins regurgitate previous human speech. Both Google Translate and Cleverbot show weaknesses for (1) unusual and/or nonliteral phrasing, and (2) long-term consistency in point of view and style. On both of those counts, even as machine translation increasingly penetrates the world of business, literary novels remain mostly untranslatable by machine."(47)

"To be human is to be a human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view; artificial intelligence suggests that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a purée is made of that identity. It is profoundly odd, then—especially so in a country with a reputation for “individualism”—to contemplate how often we do just that." [mijn nadruk] (47)

"The New York Times reported in June 2010 — in an article titled “The End of the Best Friend” — on the practice of deliberate intervention, on the part of well-meaning adults, to disrupt close nuclei of friends from forming in schools and summer camps. One sleepaway camp in New York State, they wrote, has hired “friendship coaches” whose job is to notice whether “two children seem to be too focused on each other, [and] … put them on different sports teams [or] seat them at different ends of the dining table.” Affirms one school counselor in St. Louis, “I think it is kids’ preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults — teachers and counselors — we try to encourage them not to do that.” [mijn nadruk] "(49)

Noot 4 hierbij:

"Motives range from wanting the children not to put all of their emotional eggs in one basket, to wanting them to branch out and experience new perspectives, to reducing the occasionally harmful social exclusion that can accompany tight bonds."

[Zo ziek zijn volwassenen dus. Hoezo goedbedoelende volwassenen? Waarom zo veel controle willen uitoefenen over een kind? Dan zie je kinderen als objecten waarmee je alles mag doen wat je wilt.]

"What a familiarity with the construction of Turing test bots had begun showing me was that we fail — again and again — to actually be human with other humans, so maddeningly much of the time. And it had begun showing me how we fail — and what to do about it.
Cobbled-together bits of human interaction do not a human relationship make. Not fifty one-night stands, not fifty speed dates, not fifty transfers through the bureaucratic pachinko. No more than sapling tied to sapling, oak though they may be, makes an oak. Fragmentary humanity isn’t humanity." [mijn nadruk] (50)

[Veel van de voorbeelden hebben we te maken met communicatie via technische middelen en netwerken waarbij mensen je niet zien waardoor je voor hen niet echt een persoon bent.]

"Sometimes even a single, stable point of view, a unifying vision and style and taste, isn’t enough. You also need a memory."(53)

"At the Cleverbot site, the conversation fades to white above the box where text is entered, preserving only the last three exchanges on the screen, with the history beyond that gone: out of sight, and hopefully — it would seem — out of the user’s mind as well. The elimination of the long-term influence of conversational history makes the bots’ jobs easier — in terms of both the psychology and the mathematics." [mijn nadruk] (55)

[Typisch inderdaad. ]

"Not all types of human conversations function in this way, but many do, and it behooves AI researchers to determine which types of conversations are “stateless” — that is, with each remark depending only on the last—and to attempt to create these very sorts of interactions. It’s our job as confederates, as humans, to resist it."(55)

"If we can be induced to sink to this level, of course the Turing test can be passed."(57)

"Retorts, no matter how sharp or stinging, play into chatbots’ hands. In contrast, requests for elaboration, like “In what sense?” and “How so?” turn out to be crushingly difficult for many bots to handle: because elaboration is hard to do when one is working from a prepared script, because such questions rely entirely on context for their meaning and, because they extend the relevant conversational history, rather than resetting it."(58)

(59) 3. The Migratory Soul

"The story of the Turing test, of the speculation and enthusiasm and unease over artificial intelligence in general, is, then, the story of our speculation and enthusiasm and unease over ourselves. What are our abilities? What are we good at? What makes us special? A look at the history of computing technology, then, is only half of the picture. The other half is the history of mankind’s thoughts about itself."(59)

Volgt van alles over de ziel.

"Where is all this soul talk going, though? To describe our animating force is to describe our nature, and our place in the world, which is to describe how we ought to live."(70)

[Dat is zo vaag dat het me volkomen overbodig lijkt. Zoals ook die bespreking van filosofen hier totaal overbodig is.]

"Thus, in one fell swoop, the master’s thesis of twenty-one-year-old Claude Shannon will break the ground for the processor and for digital mathematics. And it will make his future wife’s profession — although he hasn’t met her yet — obsolete.
And it does more than that. It forms a major part of the recent history — from the mechanical logic gates of Charles Babbage through the integrated circuits in our computers today — that ends up amounting to a huge blow to humans’ unique claim to and dominance of the area of “reasoning.” Computers, lacking almost everything else that makes humans humans, have our unique piece in spades. They have more of it than we do. So what do we make of this? How has this affected and been affected by our sense of self? How should it?" [mijn nadruk] (76)

[Ook dit hangt allemaal op zoiets vaags dat aan computers wordt toegeschreven als 'rede', redeneren'. Volgt een lang verhaal over de verschuiving van de interessen van hart / longen naar hersenen en dan met name de linker hemisfeer. Waarom? Hij wil blijkbaar duidelijk maken dat de nadruk in opvoeding en onderwijs is verschoven naar wiskunde en taal. Het citaat van Robinson is aardig:]

"There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they’re allowed to; we all do. We all have bodies, don’t we? Did I miss a meeting? Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side. That side, of course, being the left. The American school system “promotes a catastrophically narrow idea of intelligence and ability,” says Robinson. If the left hemisphere, as Sacks puts it, is “like a computer tacked onto the basic creatural brain,” then by identifying ourselves with the goings-on of the left hemisphere, by priding ourselves on it and “locating” ourselves in it, we start to regard ourselves, in a manner of speaking, as computers. By better educating the left hemisphere and better valuing and rewarding and nurturing its abilities, we’ve actually started becoming computers." [mijn nadruk] (89-90)

"This has been for centuries, and by and large continues to be, the theoretical mainstream, and not just economics but Western intellectual history at large is full of examples of the creature needing the computer. But examples of the reverse, of the computer needing the creature, have been much rarer and more marginal — until lately."(94)

"In the late ’80s and through the ’90s, says Shiv, neuroscientists “started providing evidence for the diametric opposite viewpoint” to rational-choice theory: “that emotion is essential for and fundamental to making good decisions.”"(95)

"All this “hemispheric bias,” you might call it, or rationality bias, or analytical bias — for it’s in actuality more about analytical thought and linguistic articulation than about the left hemisphere per se — both compounds and is compounded by a whole host of other prevailing societal winds to produce some decidedly troubling outcomes."(97)

"want to argue that this Aristotelian/Stoic/Cartesian/Christian emphasis on reason, on thought, on the head, this distrust of the senses, of the body, has led to some profoundly strange behavior—and not just in philosophers, lawyers, economists, neurologists, educators, and the hapless would-be pious, but seemingly everywhere."(99)

De eenzijdig logische, procedurele, algorithmische aanpak werkt niet bij bijvoorbeeld het vertalen van teksten. Daar werkt een statistische beter.

"Another place where we’re seeing the left-hemisphere, totally deliberative, analytical approach erode is with respect to a concept called UX, short for User Experience — it refers to the experience a given user has using a piece of software or technology, rather than the purely technical capacities of that device."(108)

"The industry as a whole seemed to take this mantra so far that function began trumping function: for a while, an arms race between hardware and software created the odd situation that computers were getting exponentially faster but no faster at all to use, as software made ever-larger demands on system resources, at a rate that matched and sometimes outpaced hardware improvements."(109)

"I think the odd fetishization of analytical thinking, and the concomitant denigration of the creatural — that is, animal — and embodied aspect of life is something we’d do well to leave behind. Perhaps we are finally, in the beginnings of an age of AI, starting to be able to center ourselves again, after generations of living “slightly to one side.”"(113)

[Waarom wordt hier gesproken over dierlijk en respect voor het dierlijke bestaan? Het lichamelijk bestaan van mensen heeft daar niet zo veel mee te maken.]

(121) 4. Site-Specificity vs. Pure Technique

Over Weizenbaums ELIZA en de reacties van mensen er op.

"Appalled and horrified, Weizenbaum did something almost unheard of: an immediate about-face of his entire career. He pulled the plug on the ELIZA project, encouraged his own critics, and became one of science’s most outspoken opponents of AI research."(123)

[Ik vind dat nog steeds bewonderenswaardig.]

"The basic template-matching skeleton and approach of ELIZA have been reworked and implemented in some form or other in almost every chat program since, including the contenders at the Loebner Prize. And the enthusiasm, unease, and controversy surrounding these programs have only grown."(124)

Over psychotherapie met dat soort programma's.

"Pure technique, Weizenbaum calls it. This is, to my mind, the crucial distinction. “Man vs. machine” or “wetware vs. hardware” or “carbon vs. silicon”–type rhetoric obscures what I think is the crucial distinction, which is between method and method’s opposite: which I would define as “judgment,” “discovery,” “figuring out,” and, an idea that we’ll explore in greater detail in a couple pages, “site-specificity.” We are replacing people not with machines, nor with computers, so much as with method. And whether it’s humans or computers carrying that method out feels secondary." [mijn nadruk] (129)

"This “draining” of the job to “robotic” behavior happens in many cases long before the technology to automate those jobs exists. Ergo, it must be due to capitalist rather than technological pressures. Once the jobs have been “mechanized” in this way, the much later process by which those jobs actually get taken over by machines (or, soon, AIs) seems like a perfectly sensible response, and, by that point, perhaps a relief. To my mind, the troubling and tragic part of the equation is the first half — the reduction of a “human” job to a “mechanical” one — and less so the second. So fears over AI would seem to miss the point." [mijn nadruk] (139)

[Een erg interessante opmerking, dat. ]

"How do you still feel creative when you’re creating more and more of the same thing? Well, I think the answer is that you can’t. Your only choice is to create more and more different things."(156)

(161) 5. Getting Out of Book

"The biggest AI showdown of the twentieth century happened at a chessboard: grandmaster and world champion Garry Kasparov vs. supercomputer Deep Blue. This was May 1997, the Equitable Building, thirty-fifth floor, Manhattan. The computer won.
Some people think Deep Blue’s victory was a turning point for AI, while others claim it didn’t prove a thing. The match and its ensuing controversy form one of the biggest landmarks in the uneasy and shifting relationship between artificial intelligence and our sense of self." [mijn nadruk] (167)

"So what happened after the Deep Blue match? Most people were divided between two conclusions: (1) accept that the human race was done for, that intelligent machines had finally come to be and had ended our supremacy over all creation (which, as you can imagine, essentially no one was prepared to do), or (2) what most of the scientific community chose, which was essentially to throw chess, the game Goethe called “a touchstone of the intellect,” under the bus."(173)

"Computers’ lightning-fast but unintuitive exploration of the game tree is known as the “brute force” method to game AI. This is what the “brute” in “brute force” means to me; this is what’s brute about it. No theory. No words."(184)

"In the beginning of the twenty-first century, former world champion Bobby Fischer shared these concerns, horrified at the generations of new players using computers to help them memorize thousands of book openings and managing to get the better of players with genuine analytical talent.16 Chess had become too much about opening theory, he said, too much “memorization and prearrangement.” “The time when both players actually start thinking,” he said, “is being pushed further and further in.” He came to an even more dramatic conclusion than Kasparov and Nunn, however, concluding, “Chess is completely dead.”"(203)

(213) 6. The Anti-Expert

"The essence of the hole-puncher precedes its existence. We humans are not like this, argue the existentialists. With us, existence comes first."(213)

[Wat een merkwaardige vergelijking eigenlijk. Waarom zouden we ons op dat punt zelfs maar willen vergelijken met een apparaat / een machine? Die laatste zijn ontworpen door mensen. Mensen zijn niet ontworpen door mensen.]

"An embrace of embodiment, of the fact that we are, yes, creatures, provides quite a measure of existential relief. Both philosophically and practically. Computers, disembodied, have it worse."(217)

"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." [mijn nadruk] (217)

"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. (...) 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."(222)

[Ik denk dat dat een verkeerde formulering is. Computers worden wel degelijk ontworpen met al die verschillende mogelijke taken in gedachten, lijkt mij. Een beetje zoals een Zwitsers zakmes. En je kunt het apparaat wat meer gechikt maken voor het een of voor het ander als een soort van specialisatie. Zelfs het onderscheid 'tools' tegenover 'tasks' vind ik niet overtuigend, omdat de twee samenhangen: het instrument IS de taak in zekere zin.]

"In other words, another rewriting of The Sentence may be in order: our machines, it would seem, are just as “universal” as we are."(223)

[Ik denk dat dat niet waar is. Of vaag.]

"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."(227)

[Boeiend. Ik vind de uitdrukking 'extistentieel ongemakkelijk' te vaag. Ik vind dat dit alles te maken heeft met een gevoel voor waarden en normen, voor wat we goed en slecht, wenselijk of niet wenselijk vinden. Het is normatieve ongemakkelijkheid.]

"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."(227)

"All this leads me to the thing I keep noticing about the relationship between human-made and human-mimicking bots and humans themselves."(230)

"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.”"(238)

(242) 7. Barging In

"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?"(244)

"Computability theory, Ackley says, has the mandate “Produce correct answers, quickly if possible,” whereas life in practice is much more like “Produce timely answers, correctly if possible.” This is an important difference — and began to suggest to me another cornerstone for my strategy at the Turing test."(252)

"One of my friends, a playwright, once told me, “You can always identify the work of amateurs, because their characters speak in complete sentences. No one speaks that way in real life.” It’s true: not until you’ve had the experience of transcribing a conversation is it clear how true this is.
But sentence fragments themselves are only the tip of the iceberg. A big part of the reason we speak in fragments has to do with the turn-taking structure of conversation."(261)

"It’s very telling that this subtle sense of when to pause and when to yield, when to start new threads and cut old threads, is something in many cases explicitly excluded from bot conversations."(264)

"To make typing visible also, then, makes typing’s “negative space” visible: hesitation. In a chat conversation where text is transmitted with every carriage return, only egregiously long pauses are taken to be “part” of the interaction. With more fluid and immediate feedback, silence acquires meaning. Failing to quickly answer a question in a face-to-face conversation, for instance, is tantamount in many cases to answering it."(271)

(283) 8. The World’s Worst Deponent

"Language is an odd thing. We hear communication experts telling us time and again about things like the “7-38-55 rule,” first posited in 1971 by UCLA psychology professor Albert Mehrabian: 55 percent of what you convey when you speak comes from your body language, 38 percent from your tone of voice, and a paltry 7 percent from the words you choose."(283)

"It’s that same, mere 7 percent that is all you have to prove your humanity in a Turing test."(284)

[Maar dat is precies de beperking, toch? Al die andere dingen die we doen om onze menselijkheid te communiceren - die andere 97% - tellen niet mee. Dat maakt het voor een computer in een computertest veel gemakkelijker om zich als mens voor te doen. En dan nog het gegeven dat die test formeel beperkt wordt tot vijf minuten. Ook dat geeft mensen minder kans om hun menselijkheid duidelijk te maken.]

"It breaks my heart, then, that so many of the communication “games” available to middle and high schoolers — namely, debate — feature conversation in its adversarial, zero-sum mode, where to weaken someone else’s argument is as good as to strengthen your own. Additionally, the metaphors we use to describe dialectics, debate, and disagreement in our culture are almost exclusively military: defending a statement, attacking a position, falling back to a weaker version of a thesis, countering one accusation with another. But conversation is just as frequently a collaboration, an improvisation, a tangoing toward truth—not so much duel as duet. It’d be worth thinking about how to offer opportunities for our children to learn this, by reconsidering both our figurative speech and the extracurricular activities available to them." [mijn nadruk] (290)

"We get to see how well presidential candidates can hack down, rebut, and debunk their rivals: How will we get to see how well they argue constructively, how they barter, coax, mollify, appease—which is what they will actually spend their term in office doing?"(291)

"Add to all the above the fact that the Turing test is, at the end of the day, a race against the clock. A five-second Turing test would be an obvious win for the machines: the judges, barely able even to say “hello,” simply wouldn’t be able to get enough data from their respondents to make any kind of judgment. A five-hour one would be an obvious win for the humans. The time limit at the Loebner Prize contest has fluctuated since its inception, but in recent years has settled on Turing’s original prescription of five minutes: around the point where conversation starts to get interesting. [mijn nadruk] (309)"

[Precies.]

(316) 9. Not Staying Intact

"In an interview situation, there’s not necessarily anything wrong with being a blank screen. But a friend who absents himself from the friendship is a bit of a jerk. And a lover who wants to remain a cipher is sketchy in both senses of the word: roughly outlined, and iffy."(327)

"Some of the earliest questions that come to mind about the capacities of chatbots are things like “Do they have a sense of humor?” and “Can they display emotions?” Perhaps the simplest answer to this type of question is “If a novel can do it, they can do it.” A bot can tell jokes — because jokes can be written for it and it can display them. And it can convey emotions, because emotion-laden utterances can be written in for it to display as well. Along these lines, it can blow your mind, change your mind, teach you something, surprise you. But it doesn’t make the novel a person." [mijn nadruk] (329)

"Seeing sophisticated behavior doesn’t necessarily indicate a mind. It might just indicate a memory." [mijn nadruk] (330)

"We so often think of intelligence, of AI, in terms of sophistication of behavior, or complexity of behavior. But in so many cases it’s impossible to say much with certainty about the program itself, because there are any number of different pieces of software — of wildly varying levels of “intelligence” — that could have produced that behavior.
No, I think sophistication, complexity of behavior, is not it at all. Computation theorist Hava Siegelmann offhandedly described intelligence as “a kind of sensitivity to things,” and all of a sudden it clicked — that’s it! These Turing test programs that hold forth, these prefabricated poem templates, may produce interesting output, but they’re static, they don’t react. They are, in other words, insensitive." [mijn nadruk] (331)

[Hetzelfde geldt voor mensen en hun communicatie. Mensen reageren ook vaak niet en zijn vaak totaal ongevoelig. Waar is het verschil met robots dan nog?]

"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."(340)

"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." [mijn nadruk] (342)

(352) 10. High Surprisal

"The landmark paper that launched information theory is Claude Shannon’s 1948 “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” and as it happens, this notion of scientifically evaluating “communication” binds information theory and the Turing test to each other from the get-go."(359)

[Dat is het probleem, ja. ]

"This turns out to be incredibly useful and also incredibly dangerous. In charting the links between data compression and the Turing test’s hunt for the human spark, I’ll explore why."(359)

"It follows that not only excerpt and quotation but description is a form of lossy compression. In fact, lossy compression is the very essence of what language is. It accounts for both its immense shortcomings and its immense value — and is another example of the “not-knowing” that allows for art."(377)

"Nothing is more dispiriting than “And they all lived happily ever after,” which means, in information entropy terms, “And then nothing interesting or noteworthy ever happened to them again for the rest of their lives.” Or at the very least, “And then you can pretty much imagine what their forties, fifties, and sixties were like, blah, blah, blah, the end.” I don’t think it would be going too far to argue that these fairy tales sow the seeds of divorce. No one knows what to do after the wedding! Like an entrepreneur who assumed his company would have been bought by now, like an actor out of lines but aware that the cameras are still rolling … marriage, for people raised on Western fairy tales, has that same kind of eerie “Um … now what?” quality. “We just, ah, keep on being married, I guess?”
“No one ever asks, ‘How did you two stay together?’ Everyone always asks, ‘How did you two meet?’ ” a husband, Eric Hayot, laments on an episode of NPR’s This American Life. The answer to how they stayed together, Hayot has explained, “is the story of like struggle, and, pain, sort of passed through and fought through and overcome. And that’s—that’s a story you don’t tell in public.” Nor, it would seem, do you ask about it; even this very segment, ending on these very words, focuses on how he and his wife met. How will we learn?" [mijn nadruk] (384)

[Dit is wel erg leuk en waar, hoewel ik tegelijkertijd niet begrijp waarom heel dat uitstapje naar Shannon, entropie, en zo verder gemaakt wordt.]

"All of this points to how, one might say, personal language is. Film and music’s power comes in large part from its universality; language’s doggedly nonuniversal quality points to a different kind of power altogether."(408)

(420) 11. Conclusion: The Most Human Human

Christian wint in 2009 The Most Human Human Award bij die Turingtestwedstrijd.

"In an article about the Turing test, Loebner Prize co-founder Robert Epstein writes, “One thing is certain: whereas the confederates in the competition will never get any smarter, the computers will.” I agree with the latter, and couldn’t disagree more strongly with the former."(424)

"Some people imagine the future of computing as a kind of heaven. Rallying behind an idea called the “Singularity,” people like Ray Kurzweil (in The Singularity Is Near) and his cohort of believers envision a moment when we make machines smarter than ourselves, who make machines smarter than themselves, and so on, and the whole thing accelerates exponentially toward a massive ultra-intelligence that we can barely fathom. This time will become, in their view, a kind of techno-rapture, where humans can upload their consciousnesses onto the Internet and get assumed, if not bodily, then at least mentally, into an eternal, imperishable afterlife in the world of electricity.
Others imagine the future of computing as a kind of hell. Machines black out the sun, level our cities, seal us in hyperbaric chambers, and siphon our body heat forever." [mijn nadruk] (425)

"the fact is, the human race got to where it is by being the most adaptive, flexible, innovative, and quick-learning species on the planet. We’re not going to take defeat lying down."(427)

"A loss, and the reality check to follow, might do us a world of good."(429)

(431) Epilogue: The Unsung Beauty of the Glassware Cabinet

Gaat voor een groot deeel over grafische vormgeving.

"Reflection and refraction are difficult to simulate on a computer. So is water distortion. So-called “caustics,” the way that a glass of wine refocuses its light into a red point on your table, are particularly hard to render."(436)

"I love these moments when the theory, the models, the approximations, as good as they are, aren’t good enough. You simply must watch. Ah, so this is how nature does it. This is what it looks like. I think it’s important to know these things, to know what can’t be simulated, can’t be made up, can’t be imagined — and to seek it."(437)