Inverting the Turing Test THE MOST HUMAN HUMAN: What Talking
with Computers Teaches Us about What It Means To Be Alive. Brian
Christian. xiv + 303 pp. Doubleday, 2011. $27.95. In his book
The Most Human Human, Brian Christian extrapolates from his
experiences at the 2009 Loebner Prize competition, a competition
among chatbots (computer programs that engage in conversation
with people) to see which is “most human.” In doing so, he
demonstrates once again that the human being may be the only
animal that overinterprets. You may not have heard of the
Loebner competition, and for good reason. The annual event was
inspired by the Turing test, proposed by Alan Turing in his
seminal 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” as a
method for determining in principle whether a computer possesses
thought. Turing meant his test as a thought experiment to
address a particular philosophical question, namely, how to
define a sufficient condition for properly attributing
intelligence, the capacity of thinking, to a co