The Most Human Human (40 page)

17
Will Wright, quoted in Geoff Keighley, “
Sim
ply Divine: The Story of Maxis Software,”
GameSpot
,
www.gamespot.com/features/maxis/index.html
.

18
Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations
, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001). 141 “Unless a man”: Bertrand Russell,
The Conquest of Happiness
(New York: Liveright, 1930).

19
Allen Ginsberg, interviewed by Lawrence Grobel, in Grobel’s
The Art of the Interview: Lessons from a Master of the Craft
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004).

20
Dave Ackley, personal interview.

21
Jay G. Wilpon, “Applications of Voice-Processing Technology in Telecommunications,” in
Voice Communication Between Humans and Machines
, edited by David B. Roe and Jay G. Wilpon (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1994).

22
Timothy Ferriss,
The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
(New York: Crown, 2007).

23
Stuart Shieber, personal interview. Shieber is the editor of the excellent volume
The Turing Test: Verbal Behavior as the Hallmark of Intelligence
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), and his famous criticism of the Loebner Prize is “Lessons from a Restricted Turing Test,”
Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery
, April 1993.

24
“The art of general conversation”: Russell,
Conquest of Happiness
.

25
Shunryu Suzuki,
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
(Boston: Shambhala, 2006).

26
“Commence relaxation”: This was from a television ad for Beck’s beer. For more information, see Constance L. Hays, “Can Teutonic Qualities Help Beck’s Double Its Beer Sales in Six Years?”
New York Times
, November 12, 1998.

27
Bertrand Russell, “ ‘Useless’ Knowledge,” in
In Praise of Idleness, and Other Essays
(New York: Norton, 1935); emphasis mine.

28
Aristotle on friendship: In
The Nicomachean Ethics
, specifically books 8 and 9. See also Richard Kraut, “Aristotle’s Ethics,” in
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
, edited by Edward N. Zalta (Summer 2010 ed.). Whereas Plato argues in
The Republic
that “the fairest class [of things is] that which a man who is to be happy [can] love both for its own sake and for the results,” Aristotle insists in
The Nicomachean Ethics
that any element of instrumentality in a relationship weakens the quality or nature of that relationship.

29
Philip Jackson, personal interview.

30
Sherlock Holmes
, directed by Guy Ritchie (Warner Bros., 2009).

1
Steven Pinker,
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
(New York: Morrow, 1994). For more on how listener feedback affects storytelling, see, e.g., Janet B. Bavelas, Linda Coates, and Trudy Johnson, “Listeners as Co-narrators,”
Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology
79, no. 6 (2000), 941–52.

2
Bernard Reginster, personal interview. See also Reginster’s colleague, philosopher Charles Larmore, who in
The Romantic Legacy
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), argues, “We can see the significance of Stendhal’s idea [in
Le rouge et le noir]
that the distinctive thing about being natural is that it is
unreflective.
” Larmore concludes: “The importance of the Romantic theme of authenticity is that it disabuses us of the idea that life is necessarily better the more [and longer] we think about it.”

3
Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,”
Mind
59, no. 236 (October 1950), pp. 433–60.

4
John Geirland, “Go with the Flow,” interview with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
Wired
4.09 (September 1996).

5
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
(New York: Harper & Row, 1990). See also Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention
(New York: HarperCollins, 1996); and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Kevin Rathunde, “The Measurement of Flow in Everyday Life: Towards a Theory of Emergent Motivation,” in
Developmental Perspectives on Motivation: Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1992
, edited by Janis E. Jacobs (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993).

6
Dave Ackley, “Life Time,”
Dave Ackley’s Living Computation
,
www.ackleyshack.com/lc/d/ai/time.html
.

7
Stephen Wolfram, “A New Kind of Science” (lecture, Brown University, 2003); Stephen Wolfram,
A New Kind of Science
(Champaign, Ill.: Wolfram Media, 2002).

8
Hava Siegelmann,
Neural Networks and Analog Computation: Beyond the Turing Limit
(Boston: Birkhäuser, 1999).

9
Michael Sipser,
Introduction to the Theory of Computation
(Boston: PWS, 1997).

10
Ackley, “Life Time.”

11
Noam Chomsky,
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965).

12
Herbert H. Clark and Jean E. Fox Tree, “Using
Uh
and
Um
in Spontaneous Speaking,”
Cognition
84 (2002), pp. 73–111. See also Jean E. Fox Tree, “Listeners’ Uses of
Um
and
Uh
in Speech Comprehension,”
Memory & Cognition
29, no. 2 (2001), pp. 320–26.

13
The first appearance of the word “satisficing” in this sense is Herbert Simon, “Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment,”
Psychological Review
63 (1956), pp. 129–38.

14
Brian Ferneyhough, quoted in Matthias Kriesberg, “A Music So Demanding That It Sets You Free,”
New York Times
, December 8, 2002.

15
Tim Rutherford-Johnson, “Music Since 1960: Ferneyhough:
Cassandra’s Dream Song,” Rambler
, December 2, 2004,
johnsonsrambler.wordpress.com
/2004/12/02/music-since-1960-ferneyhough-cassandras-dream-song.

16
“Robert Medeksza Interview—Loebner 2007 Winner,”
Ai Dreams
,
aidreams.co.uk/forum/index.php?page=67
.

17
Kyoko Matsuyama, Kazunori Komatani, Tetsuya Ogata, and Hiroshi G. Okuno, “Enabling a User to Specify an Item at Any Time During System Enumeration: Item Identification for Barge-In-Able Conversational Dialogue Systems,”
Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing
(2009).

18
Brian Ferneyhough, in Kriesberg, “Music So Demanding.”

19
David Mamet,
Glengarry Glen Ross
(New York: Grove, 1994).

20
For more on back-channel feedback and the (previously neglected) role of the listener in conversation, see, e.g., Bavelas, Coates, and Johnson, “Listeners as Co-narrators.”

21
Jack T. Huber and Dean Diggins,
Interviewing America’s Top Interviewers: Nineteen Top Interviewers Tell All About What They Do
(New York: Carol, 1991).

22
Clark and Fox Tree, “Using
Uh
and
Um.
”

23
Clive Thompson, “What Is I.B.M.’s Watson?”
New York Times
, June 14, 2010.

24
Nikko Ström and Stephanie Seneff, “Intelligent Barge-In in Conversational Systems,”
Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing
(2000).

25
Jonathan Schull, Mike Axelrod, and Larry Quinsland, “Multichat: Persistent, Text-as-You-Type Messaging in a Web Browser for Fluid Multi-person Interaction and Collaboration” (paper presented at the Seventh Annual Workshop and Minitrack on Persistent Conversation, Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science, Kauai, Hawaii, January 2006).

26
Deborah Tannen,
That’s Not What I Meant! How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships
(New York: Ballantine, 1987).

27
For more on the breakdown of strict turn-taking in favor of a more collaborative model of speaking, and its links to everything from intimacy to humor to gender, see, e.g., Jennifer Coates, “Talk in a Play Frame: More on Laughter and Intimacy,”
Journal of Pragmatics
39 (2007), pp. 29–49; and Jennifer Coates, “No Gap, Lots of Overlap: Turn-Taking Patterns in the Talk of Women Friends,” in
Researching Language and Literacy in Social Context
, edited by David Graddol, Janet May-bin, and Barry Stierer (Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters, 1994), pp. 177–92.

1
Albert Mehrabian,
Silent Messages
(Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1971).

2
For more on telling stories backward, see, e.g., Tiffany McCormack, Alexandria Ashkar, Ashley Hunt, Evelyn Chang, Gent Silberkleit, and R. Edward Geiselman, “Indicators of Deception in an Oral Narrative: Which Are More Reliable?”
American Journal of Forensic Psychology
30, no. 4 (2009), pp. 49–56.

3
For more on objections to form, see, e.g., Paul Bergman and Albert Moore,
Nolo’s Deposition Handbook
(Berkeley, Calif.: Nolo, 2007). For additional research on lie detection in the realm of electronic text, see, e.g., Lina Zhou, “An Empirical Investigation of Deception Behavior in Instant Messaging,”
IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication
48, no. 2 (2005), pp. 147–60.

4
“unasking” of the question: This phrasing comes from both Douglas R. Hofstadter,
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
(New York: Basic Books, 1979), and Robert Pirsig,
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
(New York: Morrow, 1974). Pirsig also describes
mu
using the metaphor of a digital circuit’s “high impedance” (a.k.a. “floating ground”) state: neither 0 nor 1.

5
Eben Harrell, “Magnus Carlsen: The 19-Year-Old King of Chess,”
Time
, December 25, 2009.

6
Lawrence Grobel,
The Art of the Interview: Lessons from a Master of the Craft
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004).

7
For more on the topic of our culture’s rhetorical “minimax” attitude, see, e.g., Deborah Tannen,
The Argument Culture
(New York: Random House, 1998).

8
Paul Ekman,
Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage
(New York: Norton, 2001).

9
Leil Lowndes,
How to Talk to Anyone
(London: Thorsons, 1999).

10
Neil Strauss,
The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists
(New York: ReganBooks, 2005).

11
Larry King,
How to Talk to Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere
(New York: Crown, 1994).

12
Dale Carnegie,
How to Win Friends and Influence People
(New York: Pocket, 1998).

13
David Foster Wallace,
Infinite Jest
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).

14
Melissa Prober, personal interview. 188 Mike Martinez, personal interview.

15
David Sheff, personal interview.

16
Ekman,
Telling Lies
.

17
Will Pavia tells his story of being fooled in the 2008 Loebner Prize competition in “Machine Takes on Man at Mass Turing Test,”
Times
(London), October 13, 2008.

18
Dave Ackley, personal interview.

1
Bertrand Russell,
The Conquest of Happiness
(New York: Liveright, 1930).

2
Racter,
The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed
(New York: Warner Books, 1984).

3
David Levy, Roberta Catizone, Bobby Batacharia, Alex Krotov, and Yorick Wilks, “CONVERSE: A Conversational Companion,”
Proceedings of the First International Workshop of Human-Computer Conversation
(Bellagio, Italy, 1997).

4
Yorick Wilks, “On Whose Shoulders?” (Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award speech, 2008).

5
Thomas Whalen, “Thom’s Participation in the Loebner Competition 1995; or, How I Lost the Contest and Re-evaluated Humanity,”
thomwhalen.com-ThomLoebner1995.html
.

6
The PARRY and ELIZA transcript comes from their encounter on September 18, 1972.

7
Michael Gazzaniga,
Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique
(New York: Ecco, 2008).

8
Mystery,
The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women into Bed
, with Chris Odom (New York: St. Martin’s, 2007).

9
Ross Jeffries, in “Hypnotists,”
Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends
, BBC Two, September 25, 2000.

10
Richard Bandler and John Grinder,
Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming
(Moab, Utah: Real People Press, 1979).

11
Will Dana, in Lawrence Grobel,
The Art of the Interview: Lessons from a Master of the Craft
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004).

12
David Sheff, personal interview.

13
Racter,
Policeman’s Beard
.

14
Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations
, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001).

15
My money—and that of many others: See also the famous 1993 accusation by early blogger (in fact, inventor of the term “weblog”) Jorn Barger: “ ‘The Policeman’s Beard’ Was Largely Prefab!”
www.robotwisdom.com/ai/racterfaq.html
.

16
a YouTube video: This particular video is a bot Cassandra, in development by ejTalk Corporation.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Otgt2TurCnI

17
Salvador Dalí, “Preface: Chess, It’s Me,” translated by Albert Field, in Pierre Cabanne,
Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp
(Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo, 1987).