In the wake of IBM’s Watson’s crushing victory last week on Jeopardy, newspapers and magazines are abuzz with commentary about the anthropomorphizing of this spectacular supercomputer. No less significant than the fact that Watson “clobbered his two human opponents,” writes Joanna Weiss in the Sunday Globe, “the amazing thing was the nonchalant way the humans around him behaved -- as if Watson were any other “Jeopardy” contestant who happened to have a plasma screen for a head.” For anyone interested in human or artificial intelligence, this is pretty heady stuff, no pun intended.

Assuming that I now have your attention and that you may be willing to provide assistance, I’d like to conduct an experiment.  In the March 2011 issue of The Atlantic, Brian Christian writes an extraordinary piece entitled "Mind vs. Machine."  Ever since my undergraduate days as a philosophy major I was familiar with Alan Turing and his quest to determine whether or not machines were capable of thinking (The Turing Test), but I knew little about the subsequent history of competitions for such important distinctions as the Most Human Computer and the Most Human Human.

The artificial intelligence community has maintained a keen focus on such questions since at least 1991, when the Turing Test came under the administration and sponsorship of something called the Loebner Prize.  These competitions are noteworthy because they draw attention to a seemingly illogical level of cognitive function: humans posing as computers, computers posing as humans, humans posing as humans, etc.  Even more interesting, it turns out that Turing and other pioneers of computer science were only able to describe these new computing machines by making analogies to computing humans.

The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines are intended to carry out operations which could be done by a human computer.”  Alan Turing, 1950

Christian makes a strong case that terminologies have reversed and that we humans are now like the thing that used to be like us.  For example, whereas early 20th century mathematical devices might have been said to be “like a computer,” early 21st century mathematical prodigies are now said to be “like a computer.”  I leave this issue in the capable hands of professional psychologists and philosophers, but I am intensely curious about the so-called puzzle of human uniqueness.  As attributed to Harvard’s Daniel Gilbert, the central question can be posed as follows:

“The human being is the only animal that ____________.”

Here is where I ask my readership for your help.  Please click the comment feature on this blog and tell me what you think.  Your reply may be as short as one word or as lengthy as you like.  I look forward to a lively conversation.

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