The Most Human Human - What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive

Zusatztext 40573377 Informationen zum Autor BRIAN CHRISTIAN has published work in The Atlantic, Wired, The Wall Street Journal, and many literary and scientific publications. He has been featured on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” NPR’s “Radiolab,” and “The Charlie Rose Show,” and has lectured at Google, Microsoft, the London School of Economics, and elsewhere. An award-winning poet, Christian holds a degree in philosophy and computer science from Brown University and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. The Most Human Human, a Wall Street Journal bestseller, has been translated into nine languages. Christian lives in Philadelphia. Klappentext Each year, the AI community convenes to administer the famous (and famously controversial) Turing test, pitting sophisticated software programs against humans to determine if a computer can "think." The machine that most often fools the judges wins the Most Human Computer Award. But there is also a prize, strange and intriguing, for the "Most Human Human." Brian Christian-a young poet with degrees in computer science and philosophy-was chosen to participate in a recent competition. This playful, profound book is not only a testament to his efforts to be deemed more human than a computer, but also a rollicking exploration of what it means to be human in the first place.    1. Introduction: The Most Human Human I wake up ?ve thousand miles from home in a hotel room with no shower: for the ?rst time in ?fteen years, I take a bath. I eat, as is traditional, some slightly ominous-looking tomatoes, some baked beans, and four halves of white toast that come on a tiny metal rack, shelved vertically, like books. Then I step out into the salty air and walk the coastline of the country that invented my language, despite my not being able to understand a good portion of the signs I pass on my way—let agreed, one says, prominently, in large print, and it means nothing to me. I pause, and stare dumbly at the sea for a moment, parsing and reparsing the sign in my head. Normally these kinds of linguistic curiosities and cultural gaps interest and intrigue me; today, though, they are mostly a cause for concern. In the next two hours I will sit down at a computer and have a series of ?ve- minute instant- message chats with several strangers. At the other end of these chats will be a psychologist, a linguist, a computer scientist, and the host of a popu­lar British technology show. Together they form a judging panel, and my goal in these conversations is one of the strangest things I’ve ever been asked to do. I must convince them that I’m human. Fortunately, I am human; unfortunately, it’s not clear how much that will help. The Turing Test Each year, the arti?cial intelligence (AI) community convenes for the ?eld’s most anticipated and controversial annual event—a competi­tion called the Turing test. 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 ?eld’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? Instead of debating this question on purely theoretical grounds, Turing proposed an experiment. A panel of judges poses questions by computer terminal to a pair of unseen correspondents, one a human “confederate,” the other a computer program, and attempts to discern which is which. There are no restrictions on what can be said: the dialogue can range from small talk to the facts of the world (e.g., how many legs ants have, what country Paris is in) to celebrity gossip and heavy-duty philosophy—the whole gamut of human conversation. Turing p...

Product details

• Authors: Brian Christian
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 06.03.2012
• EAN: 9780307476708
• ISBN: 978-0-307-47670-8
• No. of pages: 320
• Dimensions: 135 mm x 205 mm x 18 mm
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Religion/theology; Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Natural sciences (general)