In February, I wrote about an article in the Atlantic by Brian Christian relating his experience in trying to be the "most human" participant in a Turing test held in Britain. That's the test of computing engineering and coding where they attempt to build a computer that can respond to input in so human a way that people cannot tell whether they are communicating with a machine or a person. Now in the current issue of the New Yorker, the clever and lively writer Adam Gopnik reviews books by Christian and others on the same and related subjects.
I remember an article written by Gopnik that evidently was reprinted in his book "Paris to the Moon" that told about the pregnancy and birth his wife and he experienced while living in Paris. It was memorable for both the style and content. The Gopniks were told by their French gynecologist to be sure that she drank a glass of red wine each day, quite different advice from Americans trying to avoid fetal alcohol syndrome. Mrs. G. sat in front of the doctor's desk beside her husband in a consultation. After a few minutes, the man told her to take off her clothes. Doing so, or even being requested to do so, right in the presence of two men, in the office, would not be considered good procedure in this country.
Gopnik relates in the New Yorker article linked above that his logician-linguist mother told him as a boy that computers were not smart, only fast at retrieving records from a large collection. She said," Wait until they can talk, then we'll talk [about their intelligence]." He takes that remark and runs with it, moving to the business of conversation as an essentially human activity. He has especially memorable passages when considering a teen boy asking a teen girl on a date: "Intelligence is an affect [emotion] that flits between the empty spaces as much as it takes place in the exchanges. If a teen-age boy says to a teen-age girl 'I was, like, wondering, if, like, you'd like to, like, go to that, uh, thing at Jacob's?" and she says,"Uh, well, …" it's bad news. But if she says,"Well, um" it's promising, and if she says,"Yeah, like, funny, because, um..."it's the best news of all.
Try computing that. In fact, try just typing it.
