The Most Human Human (11 page)

When the Turing test was first proposed in 1950, it was a hypothetical: technology was nowhere near a point at which a practical test was possible. But, as we know, it got here, with the first conversational computer program to attract significant notice and attention being
ELIZA,
¹
written in 1964 and 1965 by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT. The history of conversational computer programs contains every bit as many colorful “characters” in the programs themselves as it does in the humans that created them, and ELIZA’s story is an interesting one. Modeled after a Rogerian therapist, ELIZA worked on a very simple principle: extract key words from the user’s own language, and pose their statements back to them. (“I am
  unhappy  
.” “Do you think coming here will help you not to be
  unhappy  
?”) If in doubt, it might fall back on some completely generic phrases like “Please go on.” This technique of fitting the user’s statements into a set of predefined patterns and responding with a prescribed phrasing of its own—called “template matching”—was ELIZA’s only capacity.

The results were stunning, maybe even staggering, considering that ELIZA was essentially the first chat program ever written, with essentially no memory, no processing power, and written in just a couple hundred lines of code: many of the people who first talked with ELIZA were convinced that they were having a genuine human interaction. In some cases even Weizenbaum’s own insistence was of no use. People would ask to be left alone to talk “in private,” sometimes for hours, and returned with reports of having had a meaningful therapeutic experience. Meanwhile, academics leaped to conclude that ELIZA represented “a general solution to the problem of computer understanding of natural language.” 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.

But in some sense the genie was already out of the bottle, and there was no going back. 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.

One of the strangest twists to the ELIZA story, however, was the reaction of the
medical
community, which, too, decided Weizenbaum had hit upon something both brilliant and useful with ELIZA. The
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
, for example, said of ELIZA in 1966: “If the method proves beneficial, then it would provide a therapeutic tool which can be made widely available to mental hospitals and psychiatric centers suffering a shortage of therapists. Because of the time-sharing capabilities of modern and future computers, several hundred patients an hour could be handled by a computer system designed for this purpose. The human therapist, involved in the design and operation of this system, would not be replaced, but would become a much more efficient man since his efforts would no longer be limited to the one-to-one patient-therapist ratio as now exists.”

Famed scientist Carl Sagan, in 1975, concurred: “No such computer program is adequate for psychiatric use today, but the same can be remarked about some human psychotherapists. In a period when more and more people in our society seem to be in need of psychiatric counseling, and when time sharing of computers is widespread, I can imagine the development of a network of computer psychotherapeutic terminals, something like arrays of large telephone booths, in which, for a few dollars a session, we would be able to talk with an attentive, tested, and largely non-directive psychotherapist.”

Incredibly, it wouldn’t be long into the twenty-first century before this prediction—again, despite all possible protestation Weizenbaum could muster—came true. The United Kingdom’s National Institute
for Health and Clinical Excellence recommended in 2006 that cognitive-behavioral therapy software (which, in this case, doesn’t pretend it’s a human) be made available in England and Wales as an early treatment option for patients with mild depression.

With ELIZA, we get into some serious, profound, even grave questions about psychology. Therapy is always
personal
. But does it actually need to be personal
ized
? The idea of having someone talk with a computerized therapist is not really all that much less intimate than having them read a book.
²
Take, for instance, the 1995 bestseller
Mind over Mood:
it’s one-size-fits-all cognitive-behavioral therapy. Is such a thing appropriate?

(On Amazon, one reviewer lashes out against
Mind over Mood:
“All experiences have meaning and are rooted in a context. There is not [
sic
] substitute for seeking the support of a well trained, sensitive psychotherapist before using such books to ‘reprogram’ yourself. Remember, you’re a person, not a piece of computer software!” Still, for every comment like this, there are about thirty-five people saying that just following the steps outlined in the book changed their lives.)

There’s a Sting lyric in “All This Time” that’s always broken my heart: “Men go crazy in congregations / They only get better one by one.” Contemporary women, for instance, are all dunked into the same mass-media dye bath of body-image issues, and then each, individually
and idiosyncratically and painfully, has to spend some years working through it. The disease scales; the cure does not.

But is that always necessarily so? There are times when our bodies are sufficiently different from others’ bodies that we have to be treated differently by doctors, though this doesn’t frequently go beyond telling them our allergies and conditions. But our minds: How similar are they? How site-specific does their care need to be?

Richard Bandler is the co-founder of the controversial “Neuro-Linguistic Programming” school of psychotherapy and is himself a therapist who specializes in hypnosis. One of the fascinating and odd things about Bandler’s approach—he’s particularly interested in phobias—is that he
never finds out
what his patient is afraid of. Says Bandler, “If you believe that the important aspect of change is ‘understanding the roots of the problem and the deep hidden inner meaning’ and that you really have to deal with the content as an issue, then probably it will take you years to change people.” He doesn’t
want
to know, he says; it makes no difference and is just distracting. He’s able to lead the patient through a particular method and, apparently, cure the phobia without ever learning anything about it.

It’s an odd thing, this: we often think of therapy as
intimate
, a place to be understood, profoundly understood, perhaps better than we ever have been. And Bandler avoids that understanding like—well, like ELIZA.

“I think it’s extremely useful for you to behave so that your clients come to have the illusion that you understand what they are saying verbally,” he says. “I caution you against accepting the illusion for yourself.”

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,”
³
“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. (The earliest games of computer chess were played without computers. Alan Turing would play games of “paper chess” by calculating, by hand, with a pencil and pad, a move-selection algorithm he’d written. Programming this procedure into a computer merely makes the process go faster.) What we are fighting for, in the twenty-first century, is the continued existence of conclusions not already foregone—the continued relevance of judgment and discovery and figuring out, and the ability to continue to exercise them.

“Rockstar environments develop out of trust, autonomy, and responsibility,” write programmers and business authors Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. “When everything constantly needs approval, you create a culture of nonthinkers.”

Fellow business author Timothy Ferriss concurs. He refers to micromanagement as “empowerment failure,” and cites an example from his own experience. He’d outsourced the customer service at his company to a group of outside representatives instead of handling it himself, but even so, he couldn’t keep up with the volume of issues coming in. The reps kept asking him questions: Should we give this guy a refund? What do we do if a customer says such and such? There were too many different cases to make setting any kind of procedure in place feasible, and besides, Ferriss didn’t have the
experience
necessary to decide what to do in every case. Meanwhile, questions kept pouring in faster than he could deal with them. All of a sudden he had an epiphany. You know who
did
have the experience and
could
deal with all these different unpredictable situations? The answer was shamefully obvious: “the outsourced reps themselves.”

Instead of writing them a “manual,” as he’d originally planned, he sent an email that said, simply, “Don’t ask me for permission. Do what you think is right.” The unbearable stream of emails from the reps to Ferriss dried up overnight; meanwhile, customer service at
the company improved dramatically. “It’s amazing,” he says, “how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.” And, as far too many can attest, how it halves when you take that responsibility and trust away.

Here in America, our legal system treats corporations, by and large, as if they were people. As odd as this is, “corporation” is etymologically bodily, and bodily metaphors for human organizations abound just about everywhere. There’s a great moment in the British series
The Office
when David Brent waxes to his superior about how he can’t bring himself to make any layoffs because the company is “one big animal. The guys upstairs on the phones, they’re like the mouth. The guys down here [in the warehouse], the hands.” His boss, Jennifer, is senior management: the “brain,” presumably. The punch line of the scene is, naturally, that David—who of course is the most layoff-worthy yet is the one in charge of the layoffs—can’t figure out what organ
he
is, or what role
he
plays in the organization.

But there’s a deeper point worth observing here too, which is that we create a caste system at our companies that mimics the caste system we create with respect to our own bodies and selves. My hands are
mine
, we say, but my brain is
me
. This fits in nicely with our sense of an inner homunculus pulling the levers and operating our body from a control room behind our eyeballs. It fits in nicely with Aristotle’s notion that thinking is the most human thing we can do. And so we compensate accordingly.

I almost wonder if micromanagement comes from the same over-biasing of deliberate conscious awareness that led, both to and out of, the Turing machine model of computation underlying all of our computers today. Aware of everything, acting logically, from the top down, step-by-step. But bodies and brains are, of course, not like that at all.