Brian Christian's The Most Human Essay

Social network: a person’s network of social interactions and connections as it relates to specific events and relationships. Humans have evolved to depend on the inner-workings of a social network in order to progress and function in society. A social network allows us to connect and develop a more comprehensive understanding of each other’s lives and, thus, facilitates this innately human characteristic. However, as our society rapidly progresses forward, our uniquely human capabilities tend to decrease due to the sudden proliferation of technology. Compared to the past, technology, such as artificial intelligence/AI, is able to do many behaviors that it was unable to do before, including actions that are seen as “only human”. Thus, the increase

These artificially intelligent lifeforms are programmed extensively so that they are able to complete only one task and, thus, must be programmed to complete every other task that is needed by this lifeform. Due to this fact, the artificial intelligence’s limitations of simply “thinking” of the ideas that it was programmed with ultimately exhibits its non-human abilities. This idea is portrayed throughout Brian Christian’s “The Most Human Human”. In this novel, Christian discusses the artificial intelligence’s non-human abilities through his discussion of the AI and the judge’s conversation during the Turing Test. During the Turing Test, the judge consistently tried to change the subject on the AI, stating, for instance, that “Judge: I’m cold. Remote: But how do you actually feel about him, now in the number two term. Judge: Hey, don’t you get it? I don’t want to talk about Clinton. Remote: Sorry… where was I… oh yes OK, but what happens now—does it all drift on” (Christian 198). In this quote, the programmed AI followed a specific protocol of conversation, one that flowed perfectly during the first instance with the judge. However, once the judge changed the topic of discussion, the AI did not follow correctly like a human would in a conversation. Instead, the AI continued with the conversation it was programmed with. This exhibits the non-human

However, these differences do not solely lie in an individual’s abilities. Instead, human’s expression of emotions is a uniquely human characteristic that, through a comparison to artificial intelligence, contributes to our idea of what exactly makes us “human”. Artificial intelligence, for instance, is able to conduct many computational activities, yet it is unable to express emotions. Although critics may contend that artificially intelligent life-forms, such as Siri in Apple’s IPhones or Samantha in Her, are able to express emotions, these emotions are not those found on a deeper level. Not only are these emotions rudimentary, but also the emotions that these AI showcase are programmed and, thus, are not authentic compared to the authenticity of human emotions. This idea that AI is unable to express human emotions is presented in Brian Christian’s “The Most Human Human” once again, specifically in the instance where Christian writes of the Turing Test. The Turing Test is a test that is given to AI in order to determine the capacity at which the AI is able to function similar to that of a human. This is done with a panel of judges who will have a conversation with the AI and the human to determine (through an anonymous exam) which conversation belongs to whom, thereby discovering if the AI has the potential to express