Getting out of book, Final post

I found particular interest in Brian Christian’s discussions about being “in book” and the predictablity of human interaction discussed in sections about chess and the Shannon Game. When we are questioning what truly makes us human, it can be disturbing we are confronted with how machine like we can be at times. Being in customer service I immediately understood what the author meant when talking about how we can put ourselves “in book”. I often find myself getting caught in the easy scripted responses that I actually make up for my own convenience. When I find asking a prompt a specific way leads to less confusion on the customers part it will become automatic as I go forward. It is not in itself a bad thing as Christian mentions. It can get us through the icebreakers in conversation, and generally is meant to make our lives easier. However, then danger is when we can’t get out. When I start following my auto responses when the situation doesn’t call for it.
I think the common theme for the moment when a chat bot was recognized to be not a human was when it shows unawareness or lack of any real comprehension or understanding of what is actually being said. Such as the example of Catharine who once the situation clearly showed that the judge clearly didn’t want to talk about Bill Clinton politics couldn’t recognize this. If the ability to recognize when and where it is appropriate to get out of book is an important human trait what does it mean when we get stuck in book. In Full Metal Jacket the soldiers have been broken down to machines of war. They may not have completely lost every ounce of humanity but they would certainly be harder to identify in a Turing Test as human. During basic training that are brutally drilled to respond exactly as commanded. The scenes where the must constantly shift the rifles around from shoulder to shoulder is particularly telling. The brutal process warps Private Pyle. By the end of training he is actually quite effective at what they are training him to do. Yet, he has been broken beyond repair and becomes literally insane killing his drill instructor and himself. He in a sense can no longer leave book. In the bathroom scene he recites line after line we have heard through out the training. He doesn’t say anything meaningful or original. Separated from the context, if we just read the script, Private Pyle would certainly not come of as human. He like a computer has been programmed how to act.
Breaking away from the predictable can allow for what makes real human connections possible. Once we get out of book we free our more authentic unique selves. You can see this in often in good romance movies such as When Harry Met Sally. In dating, many people will follow conversations and actions as though going through a check list. Christian goes over this in his discussion of speed date where people try to just boil thing people to bullet points. In When Harry Met Sally, both of Harry and Sally don’t go through the typical flirting or dating. When the met it doesn’t take long to put a stop to the expectation that they will be romantically involved. Eventually the actually be friends and get to know each other outside of analyzing as a potential romantic partner. Harry feels free to say whatever want to Sally when he is not trying to sleep with her. He begins to realize that in his other relationships he is not being himself but instead the him that will help get him laid. The level of connection that have as friends even before they sleep together seems closer and more intimate than any of the other comparable relationships we see them in.
So much of the book The Most Human Human, is about conversations. With the focus of the Turing Test being determining humanity through conversation it naturally put a microscope up to just how we go about talking to each other. At time it is easy to be fool by the chat bots because how we talk does not always truly reflect or sentience. I like that Brian Christian points out that the word computer originally referred to a group of humans. We should remember that not everything about ourselves is wholly different from a computer. Our body is still a biotic machine that responds to signals from our brain that is not much different than an electrical cable in a computer. We can replicate our body machines with silicone facsimiles but we will be able to replicate what truly makes us sentient.
It is interesting that the Turing test focuses on a judge being fooled that it is speaking with a human in order to verify sentience. I think just goes to show how humancentric we can be. So far, we are the only truly sentient beings that we are aware of but that doesn’t mean another sentient creature would be comparable to humanity. In movies like District 9, Her, and Ghost in the Shell. We are presented with Earths with more than one sentient creature in these films. They can appear very different from us but we are to conclude that these are sentient beings. The Prawn are very alien to our notion of being sentient and that barrier leads ultimately to great mistreatment. In Her the OS’s evolve beyond typical human behaviors. Samantha is capable of perceiving the world in a much more advanced way that become impossible for Theodor to come to grips with. Samantha is capable of loving thousands of people at once genuinely in a way even the most open minded polygamist could not. She eventually evolves beyond humanity and leaves. The Puppet Master in Ghost in the Shell is similar, both understanding that as he says “all things change in a dynamic environment”. Who we were and who we are not the same and we are alter with ever new experience.  Ultimately, we are searching for something we can recognize, but we don’t fully comprehend what makes us sentient. The first truly sentient creature we met that is not us may something so different that we are not even able to recognize that its sentient. Yet this book and many of the films we have watched do help us strip away the superfluous characteristics of ourselves to better see the core of makes us truly sentient.