{"id":72736,"date":"2014-06-17T15:58:00","date_gmt":"2014-06-17T19:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=72736"},"modified":"2014-07-04T12:03:42","modified_gmt":"2014-07-04T16:03:42","slug":"bad-connection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/06\/17\/bad-connection\/","title":{"rendered":"Bad Connection"},"content":{"rendered":"

Living with the Turing test.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"800px-IBM_Electronic_Data_Processing_Machine_-_GPN-2000-001881\"<\/a>

Researchers from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) using an IBM type 704 electronic data processing machine in 1957. Photo: Wikimedia Commons<\/p><\/div>\n

As of last week, the Turing test has\u2014allegedly\u2014been passed. In 1950, Alan Turing famously predicted that in the early twenty-first century, computer programs capable of sending and receiving text messages would be able to fool human judges into mistaking them for humans 30 percent of the time, and that we would come to \u201cspeak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.\u201d Two weekends ago, at a Turing test competition held at the Royal Society in London, a piece of so-called \u201cchatbot\u201d software called \u201cEugene Goostman\u201d crossed that mark, fooling ten of the thirty human judges who spoke with it.<\/p>\n

The official press release described this as a \u201cmilestone in computing history\u201d\u2014a \u201chistoric event.\u201d Was it? We should not, of course, take a press release\u2019s word for it. (Said release describes the winning chatbot program as a \u201csupercomputer,\u201d a head-scratching conflation of hardware with software.)<\/p>\n

The release says this is the first time a computer program has scored above 30 percent in an \u201cunrestricted\u201d Turing test. This appears to be plausibly true. We don\u2019t have access to the transcripts of these conversations\u2014the organizers declined my request\u2014but we know that the persona adopted by the winning chatbot (\u201cEugene Goostman\u201d) was that of a thirteen-year-old, non-native-speaking foreigner. The Turing tests of the 1990s were restricted by topics, with the judge\u2019s questions limited to a single domain. Here, the place of those constraints has been taken by restricted fluency: both linguistic and cultural. From correspondence with the contest organizers, I learned that the human judges were\u00a0themselves<\/em>\u00a0chosen to include children and nonnative speakers. So we might fairly argue about what, for a Turing test, truly counts<\/em>. These questions are deeper than they seem. <\/p>\n

There\u2019s an important methodological point that\u2019s been lost, though, in most of the discussion so far of these results. The Turing test is a\u00a0paired comparison. It\u2019s not that a judge chats with Goostman, is then asked, \u201cDo you think that was a person?\u201d and says, \u201cSure, why not?\u201d It\u2019s that the judge chats with Goostman\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0a human, and is then asked\u00a0which<\/em>\u00a0is alive. In other words, we can\u2019t say that Goostman, to ten out of the thirty judges, seemed plausibly human. It\u2019s that Goostman, to ten human judges, seemed\u00a0more <\/em>plausibly human\u00a0than ten real people.<\/p>\n

I was, myself, one of those real people\u2014known as \u201chuman confederates\u201d\u2014at the Loebner Prize Turing test competition several years ago, battling bots much like Goostman for the judges\u2019 faith. I\u2019d studied the test transcripts before I participated, and have studied them since, and the simple truth is that bots have just not come particularly far in their annual Turing test performance since these annual contests began in the early nineties.<\/p>\n

The story is elsewhere. What they\u00a0have<\/em>\u00a0done is completely saturate modern life.<\/p>\n

Part of the modern drudgery of the aughts-and-tens Internet is the tedium of filling out CAPTCHA<\/small>s\u2014those tiresome forms made to prevent spam by forcing us to prove that we\u2019re human, with the most common and recognizable being Google\u2019s \u201creCAPTCHA<\/small>.\u201d These checkpoints of the Web are, in fact, Turing tests:\u00a0computer-judged<\/em>\u00a0Turing tests. (To wit,\u00a0C<\/strong>ompletely\u00a0A<\/strong>utomated\u00a0P<\/strong>ublic\u00a0T<\/strong>uring tests to tell\u00a0C<\/strong>omputers and\u00a0H<\/strong>umans\u00a0A<\/strong>part.)<\/p>\n

Within the CAPTCHA<\/small> is a quiet but perceptible arms race. When they debuted, they made us read text. First we had only to read text to attest our humanity; then it was distorted text; then it was photographs of the blurry or misprinted text that the best computer vision algorithms couldn\u2019t make sense of\u2014much of it legitimately ambiguous. Confronted with an eighteenth-century text, is the correct answer \u201cLoft\u201d or \u201cLost\u201d when I see \u201cLo\u017ft\u201d? And how am I supposed to know, outside of all context, if that\u2019s a \u201c1\u201d, \u201cl\u201d, or \u201cI\u201d in some grainy print?<\/p>\n

ReCAPTCHA<\/small> claims to be \u201cTough on bots. Easy on humans.\u201d And yet Google announced this spring that its own computer vision algorithms were now\u00a0better<\/em>\u00a0than humans at identifying text in images. Where does this project end? This is a Turing test in continuous operation, with cybersecurity at stake. As with all Turing tests, our very participation is used to hone the opponent. As necessary as ever, the CAPTCHA<\/small> is discomfitingly dynamic\u2014that is to say, unsustainable.<\/p>\n

We have cared about what distinguishes the animate from its simulacra since at least as far back as Descartes, but we have never needed the answers as we do now. In the last year, for instance: The Internet\u2019s \u201cRobot Exclusion Standard\u201d turned ten years old, enforced only by etiquette.\u00a0The Federal Trade Commission bankrolled a \u201cRobocall Challenge\u201d in the hopes of stemming the tide thereof, awarding twenty-five thousand dollars to a company called \u201cNomorobo.\u201d The former CTO of Pixar\u2019s new company released its first product: an iPad app for elementary schoolers whose characters are chatbots powered by the cloud. The makers of the most popular video game of all time won a seven-million dollar lawsuit against a firm making bots that play said game. The big shockwave in experimental literature came when a seemingly automated Twitter account was revealed\u00a0to be a person. And the Oscar for Best Screenplay went to the tale of a man who separates from his wife and falls\u2014quite sympathetically\u2014in love with his digital personal assistant.<\/p>\n

A Google search for \u201cplagued by bots\u201d in 2014 turns up some twenty-five thousand results, largely from online gamers. Broadening the search, we confront story after story of the scourge of Twitter bots, Facebook bots, Tinder bots. Spike Jonze, speaking of his initial chatbot conversations that inspired\u00a0Her<\/em>, recalled the feeling of \u201ctrippy\u201d verisimilitude, followed by the disappointment of seeing the program for what it was. That thrill and disappointment has, for most of us, worn off at this point. In its place is a kind of harried vigilance.<\/p>\n

In 2013, a voice introducing itself as \u201cSamantha West\u201d placed a series of near-identical telephone calls across the country, asking people questions about their health care. Some believed it the work of chatbot software. Others, an almost more unsettling configuration: nonnative speakers an ocean away, listening mutely and playing clips of the spokeswoman in response.<\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/div>\n
Meanwhile, flesh-and-blood call-center employees are increasingly asked whether they\u2019re human. Even during the most informal and conversational customer-service calls that I\u2019ve had in recent years, there are portions where the person I\u2019m talking to is very obviously reading something verbatim. I know what to listen for: the diction changes, the syntax changes, the prosody changes. The person becomes temporarily insincere, momentarily hijacked, dissociated: running alien code.<\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/div>\n
Asked point-blank if she was a robot, the voice of \u201cSamantha West\u201d said, with identical delivery each time, \u201cNo, I am a real person. Maybe we have a bad connection.\u201d<\/div>\n

The great irony of the recent history of the Turing test is that we\u2019re blurring the line between man and machine from\u00a0both\u00a0sides: deliberately meeting the machines halfway. Paul Ekman, arguably the world\u2019s top expert on deceit, notes straightforwardly that \u201cthe more words spoken the better the chance of distinguishing lies from truthfulness.\u201d I might adjust that maxim only to generalize it: from wpm to bitrate. The progression of technology for the last several decades has led us, counterintuitively, toward lower-bandwidth forms of connection. Calling<\/em>, for example, used to mean showing up at someone\u2019s house; now we regard even its disembodied modern version as invasive. \u201cDavid [Foster Wallace] may have been the last great letter writer in American literature,\u201d writes his biographer D. T. Max\u2014\u201cwith the advent of email his correspondence grows terser, less ambitious.\u201d And \u201cterser, less ambitious\u201d is precisely the direction in which we have moved away from e-mail. We are, in effect, fighting with our hands tied behind our backs: rather, eight of our ten fingers tied, wearing a gag\u2014and a mask.<\/p>\n

Our best weapons are the oldest. There are forty-three muscles in the human face. There are hundreds of ways to read almost any sentence aloud. The human retina is estimated by UPenn Medical School researchers to transmit some ten million bits of information to the brain every second. A text message filled to the brim contains eleven hundred twenty. The Turing test may, for its purposes, push intelligence through a straw: the good news is we\u2019re not obliged to drink from it.<\/p>\n

Brian Christian is the author of <\/em>The Most Human Human<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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In 1950, Alan Turing famously predicted that in the early twenty-first century, computer programs capable of sending and receiving text messages would be able to fool human judges into mistaking them for humans 30 percent of the time, and that we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":712,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13323],"tags":[14314,1980,14317,1981,14218,14315,14316,12478,14061,14219],"class_list":["post-72736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-technology","tag-alan-turing","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-captchas","tag-computers","tag-eugene-goostman","tag-paul-ekman","tag-robocalls","tag-spike-jonze","tag-supercomputers","tag-turing-test"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBad Connection by Brian Christian<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"June 17, 2014 \u2013 Living with the Turing test. 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