What single word defines who you are?
By David
Robson
21 November
2018
As computers grow ever more
intelligent, there are some surprisingly puerile ways we could use to tell us apart from
machines.
Imagine you and an intelligent robot
are both before a judge who cannot see you. The judge will guess which of you
is the human, and so will live, while the other will die. Both you and the
robot want to live. The judge is fair and smart. The judge says: “You must each
give me one word from an English dictionary. Based on this word, I will guess
who is the human.”
What one word do you choose?
Would it be some lofty spiritual
concept like “soul”? Something that reflects your own tastes, like “music”? Or
a base bodily function, like “fart”?
This simple thought experiment may
seem fanciful, but some cognitive scientists
believe that its consideration can help to illuminate our basic assumptions
about artificial intelligence while also revealing some surprising insights
about our own minds.
Fanciful: If you describe the appearance of something as fanciful, you mean that
it is unusual and elaborate rather than plain and simple.
After all, automated ‘chat bots’ and
language generating machines increasingly employ artificial intelligence to
hold conversations with us or write reams of text that we
encounter on a daily basis. How can we tell that the
customer service representative we are chatting to online, for example, is a
real person or a chirpy algorithm? Or if a fictional
story was churned out by a machine rather than lovingly crafted by a human writer? Communicative AI is no longer a
purely theoretical prospect and we need
to be prepared to deal with it.
Ream: If you say that there are reams of paper or reams of writing, you mean
that there are large amounts of it.
On a daily basis: Daily, every day, per diem
Chirpy: Cheerful, happy, glad,lively
Churned out: To churn out something means to produce large quantities of it very
quickly.
Craft: A craft is an activity such as weaving, carving, or pottery that
involves making things skilfully with your hands.
Prospect: A particular prospect is something that you expect or know is going to
happen.
John McCoy, one of the researchers
behind the research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says he was
initially inspired by a casual conversation with his colleagues. They were
discussing the Turing Test, first developed by British scientist Alan Turing in 1950, that aims to measure whether a machine’s intelligent behaviour is
indistinguishable from that of a human.
Aim to: If you aim for something or aim to do something, you plan or hope to
achieve it. Word origin of 'aim': C14; via Old French aesmer from Latin
aestimāre to estimate.
In the most common formulation, each
judge is given a standard chat interface. In each trial, they may be talking to
a real human, or a computer chatbot powered by
artificial intelligence – and the judge’s job is to guess which it is. If the
chatbot manages to fool a pre-determined number of
judges, it has passed the Turing Test.
Chatbot: a computer program in the form of a virtual e-mail correspondent that
can reply to messages from computer users. Word origin of 'chatbot': C20; from
chat1 + (ro)bot
Manage to fool: Get to trick, get to cheat. Word origin of 'fool': C13; from Old French
fol mad person, from Late Latin follis empty-headed fellow, from Latin:
bellows; related to Latin flāre to blow
“We wondered what would be the
minimal version of the Turing Test that one could come up with,” explains
McCoy, before speculating whether it could even be captured in a single word.
“Then the question was, what were the words that people would actually say?” It
was this question that would ultimately inspire a research paper, published
this year in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
In the first experiment, McCoy and
his colleague, Tomer Ullman, asked more than 1,000 participants to answer the
question above and then analysed the words they produced to find any common
patterns.
The top 10 words, in order of popularity,
were:
Love (134 responses)
Compassion (33)
Human (30)
Please (25)
Mercy (18)
Empathy (17)
Emotion (14)
Robot (13)
Humanity (11)
Alive (9)
“It was striking how much
convergence there was between people,” says McCoy, who is now at the University
of Pennsylvania. “They can choose any word they like from a standard English
dictionary and yet there’s huge convergence across individuals.”
Consider the word “love” – around
10% of participants chose this word over all of the other hundreds of thousands
of possibilities; overall, a quarter of all the participants chose one of the
top four words.
In terms of the general themes, they
found that words conveying bodily functions (such as “poop”), faith and
forgiveness (such as “mercy” or “hope”), emotion (such as “empathy”) and food
(such as “banana”) were the most popular categories.
McCoy and Ullman then performed a
second experiment to see how other people would respond to the words generated
in the first experiment. Were the most popular items really as successful at
conveying a sense of humanity as the original participants had suspected? And
if so, which were best?
To find out, the researchers paired
the most popular words together in various combinations (such as “human” and
“love”) and asked another group of participants to determine which, of the two,
was most likely to have been generated by a human and which by a computer.
As we saw in the first study, “love”
turned out to one of the most successful. But of the choices available, the
highest-ranking word was “poop”. It may seem surprising that faeces turns out to be a human shibboleth,
but the results suggest that knowingly flouting a taboo and provoking, rather than simply
describing, an emotion might be the most straightforward way of conveying your
shared humanity. Other, more colourful, terms could also spring to mind.
Faeces [ fi.si:z ]: Faeces is the solid waste substance that people and animals get rid of
from their body by passing it through the anus. In USA they use feces.
Shibboleth [ʃɪbəleθ ]: Password. A custom, phrase, or use of language that acts as a test of
belonging to, or as a stumbling block to becoming a member of, a particular
social class, profession, etc. Word origin of 'shibboleth': C14; from Hebrew,
literally: ear of grain; the word is used by the men of Gilead to distinguish
the escaping Ephraimites, who pronounced the initial ( (ʃ) ; sh) ) as (s):
Judg. 12:4-6.
Knowingly: If you knowingly do something wrong, you do it even though you know it
is wrong.
Flouting: If you flout something such as a law, an order, or an accepted way of
behaving, you deliberately do not obey it or follow it.
Some of the other words seen as uniquely
human evoked similarly strong emotional responses that went beyond their
dictionary definition. “Moist”, for example,
or “please”. Others are just enjoyable to say. Try rolling “onomatopoeia”
around your mouth a few times.
Moist: Wet.
The reason for this might be a fair
reflection of the current state of AI. While bots can now write basic
descriptive sentences and even intelligible short stories, they still struggle
with humour and sarcasm. Humour, after all, requires a deep understanding of
context and the many cultural associations that are embedded in each word.
Besides these whimsical
speculations, McCoy suspects that this experiment could prove a useful tool to
understand people’s implicit assumptions about other groups of humans. What one
word would you choose to prove you are a woman, for instance? Or to prove you
are French, or a socialist? In each case, the choices should reveal the
qualities that we assume all group members to recognise within themselves, that
may be misunderstood or ignored by outsiders.
Whimsical: Unusual, imaginative
His own favourite was deceptively
simple. “One of the words I liked was ‘err…’ – that was clever,” McCoy says.
In general, though, it is worth
remembering that if you ever do need to prove yourself as a human in a world
increasingly run on machines, be crude, and be funny.
David Robson is a senior journalist
at BBC Future. He is @d_a_robson on Twitter.
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