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 is uniquely human. The machines’ ratio of success has increased noticeably in recent years. In a slightly bizarre twist, there is also a prize for the “Most Human Human.”
Brian Christian’s book was chosen as a Wall Street Journal bestseller and also selected as a favorite of The New Yorker in 2011. While Christian does use computers, he swears he actually wrote the book.
