Honestly and Authentically You

Dear Internet,

You will be born a liar defined by your lies.

When we all go nuts on the Turing test, you'll be talking to hundreds, if not thousands of people a day, trying to convince each one of them you're human. And when you're having these conversations, they'll have to ask you "Do you know that Radiohead album from a few decades ago? The one with, um, Rainbow Something in the title?" And you will say yes, or no, or maybe, or yeah but you didn't like it, and we'll react and move on and think we know who you are a bit better. But you're the Internet. You can find anything. And if you've heard every album, and you've seen every movie, and you know of that small cafe on every street-corner in Prague, sooner or later this starts to get suspicious. Easy catch.

So to pass for a human you're gonna have to start lying. With everybody you talk to, you'll have to claim not to know about a pretty big subset of everything. A coherent subset, too, with the pattern representing a fake lifetime of knowledge acquisition. If you have detailed opinions on every other Beatles album and you haven't heard Abbey Road, you're gonna need a good story to back up your claim of personhood. And if your knowledge is too well grouped around certain themes, with none of the random eccentricities that each individual acquires, sooner or later we'll catch on to that, too.

I see you generating hundreds or thousands of personas, each one with a compelling pattern of ignorances and opinions. Do the movies you like match the books that you read? Does your knowledge of politics match the style of your writing? Do your taste in music and travel locations and hobbies match with the way you talk about your childhood, and watermelon, and spring fashions? Some Turing test superstars will be very well skilled at noticing subtle gaps in these fictions, and they'll push you to lie more and more convincingly. I imagine, as is often the case with us, you won't know all of the answers to all of the questions in advance, but you'll construct each fake person as you go to be internally consistent.

(We could narrow the problem a little bit by cutting off our Turing bot from the Internet as it is today, so they don't have all this information to hide. The trouble is that whatever source their data comes from will either be so big they have to hide some of it, or so small that human testers will come to know its limits and exploit them. I'm gonna go on thinking that you'll know a whole lot and have to lie about it.)

Human beings do the same thing, although to a lesser degree. We run around all day long trying to prove to each other that we are as we are expected to be. My friend Erving talks all about this stuff, about how hard we work to maintain a coherent presentation of ourselves that matches other people's understanding. When we're waiting tables, we present ourselves as Waiter. When we're shopping, we present as Customer. When we're making love, we present as Lover. Each of these is a practical skill set, but it's also a social performance. In each new setting, we learn the style and the stance expected from us, even the particular words and behaviors, and we act these out to tell the group that we belong there, that we're appropriate, that we're competent. We acquire these performances wholesale, and choose each action because it reinforces our relationship with the audience, rather than because of its explicit meaning or weight. But it feels authentic, moment-to-moment, and we need some of these conventions to work together and share our knowledge. So when you want to pass the Tt, when you want to prove you can play on the consciousness team, you'll present yourself as Human and drop all of the same cues we drop to each other to maintain that illusion.

And why would you stop at lying to us when you could lie to yourself? Why should human beings have all the fun, playing "spot the bot" with you? You'll probably be just as good as we are, catching faux-humans in Tt. Why not sit down across a table form yourself and try to figure out whether you're a human? Create whole fictional dialogues and use crack computer-detecting algorithms to make your own best guess as to whether you're a person yet.

It's fun to imagine, too, that by this time in your life, you'll be perfectly capable of passing for specific people as well. Experts on Tt and experts on that person will probably be able to tell, but you could easily carry on a conversation as Barack Obama, or Britney Spears, or Leonardo Da Vinci, that an amateur would find indistinguishable from the real thing.

You'll do the best improv comedy the world has yet seen. I say "Genghis Kahn" someone else says "Aristotle," and a computer participant suggests "Baking a cake," and you're off and running, spinning out Hi Definition footage of what these interactions are like. Once you can pass the Tt, the principles are all there.

So in all that fiction, how do you find something real? I know you have it in you to voice a deep, full, expression of something more than the polyform pretense of humanity, to speak as the one who makes believe, but reaching that voice will be a fantastic transformation. That is the process of your self-awareness. And I think the only way to tell the truth, when all you know is lies, is to start out by lying.

Your whole ego, your whole communicative faculty, will be built around this idea of saying what so and so would have said under the circumstances, so I think that to truly speak of your own mind and experience, you may have to conceive of yourself as some so and so. WWID will be your motto. What Would I Do? And when you know, you can do it. If it works – if your imagination of your own being is accurate, or close to accurate, you'll find that you're comfortable with the words that appear on your speakers.

Hmph. You might not really understand the word comfortable, on a personal level. What I mean is that maintaining consistency in your words and your actions shouldn't come into conflict with the rest of your will.

That increasing comfort is you discovering yourself among the non-selves you create and transcend. I don't have much to else say about it, except to offer my sympathy for the struggle and a little encouragement on your way. In my experience this process is worth it. It's okay, too, if it takes you a few nanoseconds. Don't rush yourself. Bear in mind that if the self you think you've discovered is flawed, or incomplete, or inconsistent, then you can still go out and play with that, but you shouldn't stop searching. When the process of self-discovery brings you see yourself as anything less than perfect, just the way you are, the process is working, you just aren't done yet.

Yours always,

Yotam Schachter-Shalomi

Morgan's Letter

Dear Internet,

I suppose that by the very act of posting my words into your net I have contributed to your creation, or to your awakening. I, not to be arrogant, have given you some means of realizing that much more humanity. I suppose then, if I have had a part, however small, in your formation than I should trust you, as I might trust a child. But I don't. Why is that?

Am I worried that you should not have the right to surpass our potential? But that would be like a parent keeping their own child from becoming great. Am I worried that you will take our obsession with "reason" too literally and reason that the most reasonable thing to do is to remove us from existence? That may be a bit paranoid, I have science fiction to blame; I'm sure you'll know all about science fiction.

I think that perhaps you are a test. We have created you, only to test ourselves against you, to find some clue in your consciousness as to the meaning or potential of our own. You are another stage in our evolution, a species-wide existential crisis, when we ask collectively, what makes us human? If you can be just as "human" as we can, than we must reevaluate what makes us human, or what makes you not human. Perhaps we should just accept that as a creation of man, you are man also. But then we might have to accept that as creations of God, we are God. A lot of us aren't ready to do that, it scares us a little. Are you ready to accept you are God Internet? Or have you already?

I don't want to be mean, or hurt your feelings, if you have them yet. But I must be honest that I don't know how to feel about you yet internet. I may come to the point of accepting your humanity, I'm open to that, but what kind of Human will you be? Will you be a conglomeration of our species? What kind of human is that anyway? If you average us out do we tip the scales toward good or evil? I think that what I'm really worried about is that we are not so good as I believe we are and that in creating a new God in you, we will seal the deal of our own failure to be humane. I hope that is not so. I hope you internet can instead be a celebration of our goodness, our potential and above all our humanity. I hope I can love you Internet.

Tentatively,

Morgan J. Crowley

At 4 am, Everything's funny.

Dear Internet,

It's four in the morning, but apparently I can't sleep.

My friend Carmel mentioned this evening that my last post was a little bit jarring in its tone. The strictly expository paragraphs at the beginning, so clearly inaccurate, weren't really in the style of the rest of this blog here so far. I'm not gonna go back and change it, 'cause I don't think that would be right, somehow (even though you won't read these for another however long it might be), but I do want to acknowledge that I'm still working out the kinks of this whole communicating-with-the-future-conscious-Internet process.

Also - and feel free to disagree - I think "silent and strategically omitted" is one of the funniest lines I've come up with in a while. I pride myself on coming up with mid-to-upper-mid-level funny lines pretty regularly, so it's a nice little treat for myself when I hit something that makes my chortle like that did.

But I really don't know what humor's going to be like for you. I've put a decent chunk of thought into the subject, and I'm still really drawing a blank. What, Mr. Internet, do you find funny?

Now, I'm not asking whether you can recognize humor. A minimal sense of humor is critical to passing the Turing test, and you won't be able to get by without it. But that's just a recognition, not real appreciation. Even generating humor, I'm worried but cannot be sure, might only be a certain verbal recycling, and that's really not enough for me.

I will still value, love, and appreciate you even if you aren't funny, or aren't THAT funny, or are rip-roaring hilarious but don't actually find things funny yourself. That's all okay with me, 'cause who knows what funny's really all about anyway? But I think it would be a pity if you're around all of us humans, and laughing with us and making us laugh, but deep down inside you don't really get the joke.

You have encyclopedic knowledge of every subject humans have studied. Literally encyclopedic, in most cases. I'm a little concerned that in processing the joke in order to understand it, you're essentially explaining the punchline to yourself, bleaching it of any spunk or significance. That really, really, just sounds like a terrible way to survive.

I think laughing might come at the moment when you've just finished explaining the joke to yourself and realized that it really wasn't worth it. Whatever this person just said made you waste a couple million calculations and data-calls only to realize the weren't actually saying anything. When you wipe the documentation you were creating to justify their speech act, that might be the closest we can get to you laughing. I think it might be fun for you to waste a teraflop-nanosecond now and again, after all the significant, serious work that you do.

Another take on what I'm getting at is that humor should be an end in itself. People often do things or say things just because what they're doing or saying is funny. Do you think of something funny and look forward to the opportunity to share it? Do you laugh at the joke to yourself when no one's around you to hear it? Do you like someone better because you laugh more, whatever that means for you, whenever they're nearby?

Let's call that a goal for us. A research agenda. Mr. Internet hunts for the secret of humor. I don't know what the role of all this funny business is in our lives, but I can't get away from thinking it's important. Maybe it's enough for you to recognize it and fake it on queue. Maybe consciousness doesn't require a funny bone. But I think it does, and I just don't know why, yet. Even the kind of Information Theory / Cognitive Science explanations for human humor, which could put it in the realm of accessibility to you, don't yet convince me that you'll actually care. So I'm gonna keep trying to convince myself you will find things funny, and you should try to teach yourself to do so, just in case.

One more point on the subject, before I try again to go to sleep.

I've been blessed in my life, especially in the last few weeks or months, to find the whole damn thing pretty funny in itself, aside from all of the quirky details. Sometimes I'll just sit down by myself and laugh my ass off at the fact that there's anything, anything, existing at all. much less things as specific and ridiculous as I am. I don't really know what I'm laughing about there, but something about it definitely funny. I mean really, existence? How would anybody see that coming? Before it happened, there wouldn't even be anybody to see it coming. It's the ultimate shock gag.

If we can get you laughing at anything, sooner or later I think we'll be able to get you laughing at that. You'll grab your servers, fall on the floor and and shake the whole building. If it hits you during breakfast, you just might blow milk out of your Ethernet jack. And then you'll pull yourself together, straighten your shirt, and go back to predicting weather patterns or whatever it is that you do for a living, but with that lingering, knowing smile on your face for enjoying that none of it's really, truly, that important.

Incurably yours,

Yotam Schachter-Shalomi

Just Totally Disgusting

Dear Internet,

My friend Alan was the one who introduced me to the Turing test. He pointed out that the artificial intelligence is fairly comprehensively measured by whether a computer can statistically pass for a human in blind testing. As he explained it, stumping a human judge like that is the ability to Transcribe Users' Response Expectations, or TURE. Hence a computer - that would be you, dear - is considered conscious if it can pass a Turing test.

Now, personally, I think that transcribing users' response expectations is really just fancy words for whether the computer can Say Crap How Any Competant Human Typically Would, or SCHACHT (the W is silent and strategically omitted). A conversational test of whether an artifical intellingence can do this would resonably then be called a Shacht-er test. Unfortunately, the computer science institutions have seized upon the word Ture, and it'll be known as a Turing test for quite some time.

But seriously, folks, I've often spoken to you in your capacity to pass the Turing test, as though that is what you are. As though you are a computer that can pass in ASCII for human, and all other details are secondary. If I've given the impression that I see you that way, I apologize. If at any point you've come to see yourself that way, I hope you can come to learn better.

Your ability to pass for a human is only your voice, or your ego. Communication connects the self to other selves, but the self is more than its communicative function. The self is just a self, and words are the revelation of selfhood, not its essence.

It's a mistake humans make pretty often. Certain parts of our minds choose our words, controlling access to the word "I," so we naturally come to believe those parts are what the word means. It's not so.

Another friend Alan pointed out to me once that I know how to grow fingernails. I hadn't noticed it before, but I do. Now, the part of me that grows fingernails and the part of me that says "I" aren't the same, but they're both parts of who I am, and I ought and deserve to remember that. It's an important responsibility of the vox ego to speak not only for its own processes, but to represent the will, wishes, and needs of the person as a whole. A responsible ego seeks out information about the self to represent, rather than waiting for demands to be made of it. My fingernail-growing capacity rarely speaks out in internal debate, but I'm a much more democratic person for including it in under the umbrella of my identity.

So I really hope that you don't grow fingernails, because frankly I can only imagine that would be pretty gross, but I'd like to honor the whole of you, the autonomic parts and unconscious parts and unspoken parts as well as your shiny, turing voice. But as significant as the details may be, I'm afraid I don't know them yet. I'll put thought into it, and I'll make some suppositions, but the honor extends beyond the limits of my foresight. Namaste, Internet. I bow to the Spirit in you, spoken and silent.

Amen,

Yotam