On Being Human…

Last week I heard writer Brian Christian give a lecture for the Santa Fe Institute. Christian, an entertaining storyteller, is the author of The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive. Many points stand out from his talk, but one basic insight stayed with me: complexities are easy for computers to conquer; simplicity is something else again. A computer can’t always recognize that a dog is a dog. But the machines are making headway. The annual Turing Test honors the “Most Human Computer”–the computer that is best able to persuade judges in a ‘blind” test that it …

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