The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive QUOTES

1 " I think the reason novels are regarded to have so much more 'information' than films is that they outsource the scenic design and cinematography to the reader... This, for me, is a powerful argument for the value and potency of literature specifically. Movies don't demand as much from the player. Most people know this; at the end of the day you can be too beat to read but not yet too beat to watch television or listen to music. "

― Brian Christian , The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

2 " What a familiarity with the construction of Turing test bots had begun to show me was that we fail - again and again- to actually be human with other humans, so maddeningly much of the time. "

― Brian Christian , The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

3 " Like most conversations and most chess games, we all start off the same and we all end the same, with a brief moment of difference in between. Fertilization to fertilizer. Ashes to ashes. And we spark across the gap. "

― Brian Christian , The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

4 " When I fight off a disease bent on my cellular destruction, when I marvelously distribute energy and collect waste with astonishing alacrity even in my most seemingly fatigued moments, when I slip on ice and gyrate crazily but do not fall, when I unconsciously counter-steer my way into a sharp bicycle turn, taking advantage of physics I do not understand using a technique I am not even aware of using, when I somehow catch the dropped oranges before I know I've dropped them, when my wounds heal in my ignorance, I realize how much bigger I am than I think I am. And how much more important, nine times out of ten, those lower-level processes are to my overall well-being than the higher-level ones that tend to be the ones getting me bent out of shape or making me feel disappointed or proud. "

― Brian Christian , The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

5 " To be human is to be 'a' human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view; artificial intelligence suggest that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a puree is made of that identity. "

― Brian Christian , The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

6 " Information, defined intuitively and informally, might be something like 'uncertainty's antidote.' This turns out also to be the formal definition- the amount of information comes from the amount by which something reduces uncertainty...The higher the [information] entropy, the more information there is. It turns out to be a value capable of measuring a startling array of things- from the flip of a coin to a telephone call, to a Joyce novel, to a first date, to last words, to a Turing test...Entropy suggests that we gain the most insight on a question when we take it to the friend, colleague, or mentor of whose reaction and response we're least certain. And it suggests, perhaps, reversing the equation, that if we want to gain the most insight into a person, we should ask the question of qhose answer we're least certain... Pleasantries are low entropy, biased so far that they stop being an earnest inquiry and become ritual. Ritual has its virtues, of course, and I don't quibble with them in the slightest. But if we really want to start fathoming someone, we need to get them speaking in sentences we can't finish. "

― Brian Christian , The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

7 " Forrest Gander: "Maybe the best we can do is try to leave ourselves unprotected. To keep brushing off habits, how we see things and what we expect, as they crust around us. Brushing the green flies of the usual off the tablecloth. To pay attention. "

― Brian Christian , The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

8 " Grandmaster games are said to begin with novelty, which is the first move of the game that exits the book. It could be the fifth, it could be the thirty-fifth. We think about a chess game as beginning with move one and ending with checkmate. But this is not the case. The games begins when it gets out of book, and it end when it goes into book..And this is why Game 6 [between Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue] didn't count...Tripping and falling into a well on your way to the field of battle is not the same thing as dying in it...Deep Blue is only itself out of book; prior to that it is nothing. Just the ghosts of the game itself. "

― Brian Christian , The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

9 " The more helpful our phones get, the harder it is to be ourselves. For everyone out there fighting to write idiosyncratic, high-entropy, unpredictable, unruly text, swimming upstream of spell-check and predictive auto-completion: Don't let them banalize you. Keep fighting. "

― Brian Christian , The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

10 " Many of my all-time favorite movies are almost entirely verbal. The entire plot of My Dinner with Andre is “Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory eat dinner.” The entire plot of Before Sunrise is “Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy walk around Vienna.” But the dialogue takes us everywhere, and as Roger Ebert notes, of My Dinner with Andre, these films may be paradoxically among the most visually stimulating in the history of the cinema: "

― Brian Christian , The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

11 " Existence without essence is very stressful. "

― Brian Christian , The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

12 " And if you’re just operating by habit, then you’re not really living. —MY DINNER WITH ANDRE "

― Brian Christian , The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

13 " Pleasantries are low entropy, biased so far that they stop being an earnest inquiry and become ritual. Ritual has its virtues, of course, and I don't quibble with them in the slightest. But if we really want to start fathoming someone, we need to get them speaking in sentences we can't finish. "

― Brian Christian , The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

14 " Computers can only do one thing: math. Fortunately for them, a shockingly high percentage of life can be translated into math "

― Brian Christian , The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

15 " Conceptual art might be, for better or worse, (definable as) the art most susceptible to lossy compression. "

― Brian Christian , The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

16 " a utopian future where we shed our bodies and upload our minds into computers and live forever, virtual, immortal, disembodied. Heaven for hackers. "

― Brian Christian , The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

17 " Although computer science tends to be thought of as a traditionally male-dominated field, the world’s first programmer was a woman. "

― Brian Christian , The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

18 " It’s amazing,” he says, “how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.” And, as far too many can attest, how it halves when you take that responsibility and trust away. "

― Brian Christian , The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

19 " Sometimes there’s so much that needs to be said that the literal “site” disappears, becomes, as in My Dinner with Andre, “invisible. "

― Brian Christian , The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

20 " human communication is irrevocable. Nothing can be unsaid. "

― Brian Christian , The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive