The Most Human Human (26 page)

Your mileage may vary: such extreme examples of someone deliberately jamming the conversational cogs are pretty rare. But sometimes we present a sheer face to someone by accident, and with the best of intentions. Leil Lowndes talks about meeting a woman who was hosting an event where Lowndes was speaking, and the woman just sits there and waits for the “conversation expert” to dazzle her. The momentum already slipping out of the interaction, Lowndes tries to keep it going by asking the host where she’s from. “Columbus, Ohio,” the host says, and then just smiles expectantly, to see what the pro will say next. But where can anyone—who doesn’t happen to have anecdotal experience of Columbus, Ohio—go from there? The only avenue is to offer your own background uninvited (“Ah, well I’m from _____”) or just say something like “Oh, I don’t know much about Columbus, although you hear about it a lot; what’s it like?” Either way, the holds are far from obvious.

The same idea applies in the case of text-based role-playing games, a.k.a. “interactive fictions,” some of the earliest computer games. 1980’s
Zork
, for instance, perhaps the best-known (and best-selling) title of the genre and era, begins as follows: “You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.” That’s just about right. Two or three different holds, and you let the user choose.

My friend and I once jokingly tried to imagine the world’s most unhelpful text-based role-playing game. “You are standing there,” it would begin. Or, if you enter a house: “You enter the house.” And if the user types the “look” command: “You see the inside of the house.” No description at all. Sheer walls, literally and figuratively.

There’s only one or two exceptions: you might purposely try to strip the holds off a particular story because you want
less
participation from your conversant. I often find myself saying things like “So I rode my bike to the coffee shop this afternoon, and there was this
guy
there, and he was all—” “You
rode
your
bike
? In
this
weather?” And the wind goes out of the sails. Sometimes you want your listeners to choose their own adventure; sometimes you want to take
them on one adventure in particular. Replacing “rode my bike” with “went,” reducing the degree of that vertex, eliminates a potentially distracting hold. It reduces conversational drag. And maybe forcing my listener to envision the bicycle is a waste of their brainpower, a red herring anyway.

The bottom line is that it depends on what our conversational
goals
are. If I’m just shooting the breeze, I’ll put in all kinds of holds, just to see what my conversant grabs onto—just to give them the most options for a favorable topic direction. If I have something really important to say, I’ll streamline.

When you want to artfully wrap up a conversation, it’s easy to put on the brakes. You stop grabbing their holds, you stop free-associating (“that reminds me of …”), you start stripping the holds off of your own turns. Eventually the conversation downshifts or cul-de-sacs and you end it. It’s subtle and graceful, sometimes even subliminal.

A friend from across the country calls me just to catch up. “What are you up to?” she says.

Where I might have said, before my Turing test preparation, “Oh, nothing,” or “Oh, just reading,” now I know to say
what
I’m reading, and/or what I’m reading
about
. Worst case, I waste, you know, a dozen or so syllables of her time. But even then, I’m displaying a kind of enthusiasm, a kind of zest, not only with respect to my own life, but with respect to the conversation as well: I’m presenting
an uneven face
. In the sense of: climbable. I’m offering departure points. This is why “peacocking” makes sense; this is why it’s good to decorate your house with photographs from your life, especially of travel, and with favorite books. A good house, from the perspective of both conversation and memory, is neither squalid (full of meaningless things) nor sterile (devoid of anything), but abounds in (metaphorical) jewel-tone rubber blobs.

So, making the most minor of adjustments, I say, “Reading
Infinite
Jest,
” and she says, “Oh!
Infie-J
!” and I say, “You call it
Infie-J
?!” then we are off to the races before I even have a chance to ask her how
she
is—and whenever the
Infie-J
thread runs out of steam, I will—and meanwhile we’ve set a precedent that we don’t want the short, polished, seamless answer. It’s the seams on a baseball, for instance, that allow it to curve.

All the theory is well and good, but what about the practice? How to bring the idea of holds to the Turing test?

Holds are useful for the judges to manipulate. Limiting the number of holds can stall the conversation, which is potentially interesting: humans, on the side of truth, would have more of an incentive to reanimate it than the computers. On the other hand, computers are frequently oblivious to conversational momentum anyway, and tend to be eager to topic shift on a dime; it’s likely a many-holds approach from the judge might be best. One idea that a judge might employ is to put something odd into the sentence—for instance, if asked how long they traveled to the test: “Oh, just two hours in the ol’ Model T, not too far.” A grammatical parser might strip the sentence down to “two hours—not far,” but a human will be so intrigued by the idea of a guy driving a hundred-year-old car that the ordinary follow-ups about traffic, commuting, etc., will be instantly discarded.

As for myself on the confederate side, in that odd and almost oxymoronic situation of high-pressure chitchat, I would have planted holds all over the first few remarks (“no holds barred”?), because there just isn’t any time for slow starts. A judge might find it useful to stall a confederate, but surely not the reverse.

A simple, flat, factual answer (what Lowndes calls a “frozen” or “naked” answer) offers essentially a single hold, asking for more information about that answer. (Or one and a half holds, if you count awkwardly volunteering one’s
own
answer to the same question:
“Cool, well
my
favorite movie is …”) The only thing worse—which many bots and some confederates nonetheless do—is not answering at all. Demurrals, evasions, and dodges in a Turing test can be fatal: it’s harder to prove that you
understand
a question when you’re dodging it.

It surprised me to see some of the other confederates being coy with their judges. Asked what kind of engineer he is, Dave, to my left, answers, “A good one. :)” and Doug, to my right, responds to a question about what brings him to Brighton with “if I tell you, you’ll know immediately that I’m human ;-).” For my money, wit is very successful, but coyness is a double-edged sword. You show a sense of humor, but you jam the cogs of the conversation. Probably the most dangerous thing a confederate can do in a Turing test is
stall
. It’s suspect—as the
guilty
party would tend to be the one running out the clock—and it squanders your most precious resource: time.

The problem with the two jokes above is that they are not contextually tied in to anything that came before in the conversation, or anything about the judges and confederates themselves. You could theoretically use “if I tell you, you’ll know immediately that I’m human” as a wild-card, catch-all, panic-button-type answer in a bot (similar to ELIZA’s “Can you say more about that?”), applicable for virtually
any
question in a conversation. And likewise, it’s easy to imagine a bot replying “A good one :)” by template-matching a question asking what kind or type of
x
something is. Decontextual, non-context-sensitive, or non-site-specific remarks are, in the case of the Turing test, dangerous.

Many last names in America are “occupational”—they reflect the professions of our ancestors. “Fletchers” made arrows, “Coopers” made barrels, “Sawyers” cut wood, and so on. Sometimes the alignment of one’s last name and one’s career is purely coincidental—see, for
instance, poker champion Chris Moneymaker,
⁶
world record-holding sprinter Usain Bolt, and the British neurology duo, who sometimes published together, of Russell Brain and Henry Head. Such serendipitous surnames are called “aptronyms,” a favorite word of mine.

Such were the sorts of thoughts in my head when I called attorney Melissa Prober. Prober’s worked on a number of high-profile cases, including being part of the team that defended President Clinton during the investigation leading to his impeachment hearings and subsequent Senate acquittal. The classic advice given to all deponents, Prober explained to me, is to answer
just
the question being asked, and
only
the question being asked.

Her colleague (who has since become the executive assistant U.S. attorney for the district of New Jersey) Mike Martinez concurred. “If you volunteer too much—First, it’s just not the way the system’s supposed to be anyway. The way it’s supposed to be is Lawyer A makes a question and Lawyer B decides whether that’s a fair question. If the person answers beyond that, then he’s doing so unprotected.”

It’s interesting—many Loebner Prize judges approach the Turing test as a kind of interrogation or deposition or cross-examination; strangely, there are also a number of
confederates
who seem to approach it with that role in mind. One of the conversations in 2008 seems never to manage to get out of that stiff question-and-response mode:

Yawn! Meanwhile the computer in the other terminal is playful from the get-go:

And has practically sealed up the judge’s confidence from sentence two. Note that the confederate’s stiff answers prompt more grilling and forced conversation—what’s your opinion on such-and-such political topic? But with the computer, misled into assuming it’s the real person by its opening wisecracks, the judge is utterly casual: How are things? This makes things easier for the computer and harder for the confederate.

The humans in a Turing test are strangers, limited to a medium that is slow and has no vocal tonality, and without much time—and also stacked against them is the fact that the Turing test is
on the record
.

In 1995 one of the judges, convinced—correctly, it turns out—that he was talking to a female confederate,
asked her out
, to which she gave the mu-like non-answer “Hm. This conversation is public isn’t it?” And in 2008 two humans got awkward and self-conscious:

That guardedness makes the bots’—I can’t believe I was going to say
“lives”
here—easier.

As author and interviewer David Sheff—who wrote, among numerous books and articles, the last major interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, for
Playboy
in 1980—explains to me, “The goal has always been to transform the conversation from a one that is, you know, perceived by the subject
as
an interview to one that becomes a dialogue between two people. The best stuff always came when it was almost as though the microphone disappeared.” In the conversation we saw earlier, with the judge saying “Do you think we have too many cars on the road” in one window and “So how are things with you today?” in the other, this difference in timbre can make a big difference.

The paradigm of guardedness in our culture is the politician. Just the other day some of my friends were talking about a mutual acquaintance who has started obsessively scrubbing and guarding his Facebook profile. “What, is he running for office or something?” they half joked. That’s the kind of character-sterility that our society both demands and laments in politics. No holds.

Professional interviewers across the board say that guardedness is the worst thing they can run into, and they are all, as far as I can tell,
completely
unanimous in saying that politicians are the worst interview subjects imaginable. “With every response they’re [politicians] trying to imagine all the pitfalls and all the ways it could come back to bite them,” Sheff says. “The most interesting people to interview are the people who want to do exactly what you want to do in this test—which is to show that they’re a unique individual.” That tends not to be on politicians’ agendas—they treat conversation as a minimax game, partially because their worst words and biggest gaffes and failures so often ring out the loudest: in the press, and sometimes also in history. Whereas
artists
, for example, will generally be remembered
for their
best
, while their lesser works and miscues are gracefully forgotten. They can be non-zero-sum.