HTA-0598: Good Afternoon — Who Are You? (Street Interview)

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Summary

Henry conducts casual street interviews asking people about themselves.

Full Transcript

00:00
Good afternoon, who are you?

00:03
But I wouldn't say that any afternoon could be good.

00:06
Why not?

00:07
It's called the Turing test, and it is the question of whether a computer can actually be as human as a human.

00:15
Can we tell the difference between people and computers?

00:18
And this is actually an important issue because eventually, is it possible, computers will be more human than people?

00:25
So let me introduce you to a man who actually tested the concept.

00:29
Brian Christian, poet, philosopher, and computer expert, he wrote a book called "The Most Human,

00:38
Human," and he went and checked out the Turing Test in this competition that takes place

00:43
every year.

00:43
So could you explain please what the Turing Test is?

00:46
Absolutely.

00:47
The concept of the Turing Test goes back to the 1950s, basically when the computer was

00:52
first being invented.

00:55
People were already asking these really philosophical questions.

00:58
Can these machines actually think in the way that a human can?

01:01
You know, could we someday build a machine that was intelligent, that had a mind?

01:06
And the British mathematician Alan Turing, one of the founders of computer science, said,

01:10
you know, let's put philosophy aside and have a practical experiment.

01:15
Let's just hold the test and kind of settle this question.

01:18
And the way the test works is you assemble a panel of scientists to have a series of

01:23
five minute kind of instant message text chats.

01:28
And the catch is that half of these chats

01:30
are gonna be with real people

01:32
who are sort of hidden in a room down the hall

01:34
typing on computers.

01:35
And half are going to be with computer programs

01:39
claiming to be real people

01:41
sort of hidden in these rooms typing.

01:43
And so it's up to this panel of scientists

01:45
in five minutes of conversation

01:47
to see if they can figure out who's who.

01:49
And if they can't, said Alan Turing,

01:52
then we'll have to sort of concede that these computers are mimicking intelligence so successfully that they actually are intelligent.

01:59
So you actually became one of those who was trying to be human.

02:05
Now, you happen to be a human being, which theoretically gives you an advantage, but did you find it was a challenge?

02:12
Oh, I mean, it's a very strange position to be in, you know, where I was one of what are called the Confederates.

02:18
So I was trying to convince this judge through this text conversation that in fact I am human,

02:26
knowing all the while that there are computer programs saying exactly the same thing.

02:31
And so there is a bit of an existentially strange question about that.

02:36
Did you succeed?

02:37
I'm very happy to say that I did succeed.

02:40
The contest has a sort of intriguing award called the Most Human Human Award that goes

02:48
every year to the Confederate that's most able to persuade the judges that they are

02:53
in fact a human.

02:54
So I'm very pleased to say that I was the recipient of the Most Human Human Award.

02:58
So his name is Brian Christian and he is the Most Human Human.

03:02
If you'd like to meet him in human person, he's part of Litquake which is taking place

03:07
this weekend.

03:08
Excuse me. He'll be today at the Delancey Street Screening Room in San Francisco.

03:12
You can go to litquake.org for more information.

03:17
And I think Steve Jobs would have been very proud of you because I think he probably had the vision that the most human human would be people and not the computers that he created.

03:28
The book is a fascinating book. A good read. Thank you for joining us.

03:31
Thanks so much.

03:32
We're going to take a break. When we come back from computers to dogs, why dogs make us human, we'll explain coming up in the product for our news.

03:47
We'll see you next week.