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The Most Human Human: What Talking with…
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The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive (original 2011; edition 2011)

by Brian Christian

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5411544,315 (3.82)14
"The Most Human Human" is a provocative exploration of the ways in which computers are reshaping our ideas of what it means to be human. Its starting point is the annual Turing Test, which pits artificial intelligence programs against people to determine if computers can "think."
Member:scarletsparks
Title:The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive
Authors:Brian Christian
Info:Doubleday (2011), Hardcover, 320 pages
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The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive by Brian Christian (2011)

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» See also 14 mentions

Showing 1-5 of 15 (next | show all)
If I had read this book when I initially added it to my TBR in 2011-ish I would have found it interesting, but AI and GenAI have evolved too much.

Stopped before 100 pages.
  Bodagirl | Feb 26, 2024 |
I really enjoyed this book. The framework is that the author wants to win the Most Human Human award at the annual Loebner Prize, a competition that is actually focused on the AI community. In preparation for this event he decides to investigate what it actually means to be human, with his research, conversations, and introspections comprising the actual bulk of the book. This idea - what it means to be human - takes the reader on a free-ranging journey, so much so that at times I actually stopped to think, "Wait, what is this book about?" Once I remembered the overall subject matter, the topics would make sense in the book; even though the author talks about things that seem unrelated, they all fit nicely together in the context of how they make us human (or less-than-human, which is more interesting). By the final chapter I was getting a little impatient for the end, which the author actually discusses in general at one point. Overall, very enjoyable. ( )
  blueskygreentrees | Jul 30, 2023 |
There is an annual contest in England between developers of artificial intelligence systems and human beings. Questions are asked simultaneously to computers and humans and a team of judges try to determine which answers came from a computer and which came from a human. There are two prizes, one for the most human computer and one for the most human human. Brian Christian set out to win the most human human award. He spent a year studying past competitions and what it means to be human. It's a good story. He's another I saw on "The Daily Show" prior to reading the book ( )
  capewood | Mar 12, 2022 |
Christian writes from the perspective that it will be bad if and when machines are intelligent, he's kind of an anti Ray Kurzweil. I completely disagree with his viewpoint but his book is interesting and illustrates lots of Turing problems that I'd never considered.

He goes on to say that it will not happen that the same bot will win year after year but is proved wrong just 2 years after the book is written by Mitsuku who won in 2013,2016-2019

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsuku ( )
  kevn57 | Dec 8, 2021 |
Showing 1-5 of 15 (next | show all)
In his landmark 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” the mathematician, philosopher and code breaker Alan Turing proposed a method for answering the question “Can machines think?”: an “imitation game” in which an “interrogator,” C, interviews two players, A and B, via teleprinter, then decides on the basis of the exchange which is human and which is a computer.

Turing’s radical premise was that the question “Can a machine win the imitation game?” could replace the question “Can machines think?” — an upsetting idea at the time, as the neurosurgeon Sir Geoffrey Jefferson asserted in 1949: “Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain — that is, not only write it but know that it had written it.” Turing demurred: if the only way to be certain that a machine is thinking “is to be the machine and to feel oneself thinking,” wouldn’t it follow that “the only way to know that a man thinks is to be that particular man”? Nor was the imitation game, for Turing, a mere thought experiment. On the contrary, he predicted that in 50 years, “it will be possible to program computers . . . to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 percent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning.”

Well, he was almost right, as Brian Christian explains in “The Most Human Human,” his illuminating book about the Turing test. In 2008, a computer program called Elbot came just one vote shy of breaking Turing’s 30 percent silicon ceiling. The occasion was the annual Loebner Prize Competition, at which programs called “chatterbots” or “chatbots” face off against human “confederates” in scrupulous enactments of the imitation game. The winning chatbot is awarded the title “Most Human Computer,” while the confederate who elicits “the greatest number of votes and greatest confidence from the judges” is awarded the title “Most Human Human.”

It was this title that Christian — a poet with degrees in computer science and philosophy — set out, in 2009, to win. And he was not about to go “head-to-head (head-to-motherboard?) against the top A.I. programs,” he writes, without first getting, as it were, in peak condition. After all, for Elbot to have fooled the judges almost 30 percent of the time into believing that it was human, its rivals had to have failed almost 30 percent of the time to persuade the judges that they were human. To earn the “Most Human Human” title, Christian realized, he would have to figure out not just why Elbot won, but why humanity lost. . . .
added by PLReader | editNY Times, David Leavitt (Mar 18, 2011)
 
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"The Most Human Human" is a provocative exploration of the ways in which computers are reshaping our ideas of what it means to be human. Its starting point is the annual Turing Test, which pits artificial intelligence programs against people to determine if computers can "think."

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Penguin Australia

2 editions of this book were published by Penguin Australia.

Editions: 0670920797, 0241956056

 

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